Welcome to the Systems Thinking Voices In Canada Directory

This is where you can view the Personal Biographies of everyone who has chosen to register in the STVIC directory and become a member of the STVIC community. Because registration is a personal choice, the STVIC community represents an unknown portion of the full community of people using systems thinking skills in Canadian context activities. Each person and activity is contributing to Canadian context systems thinking literacy. Click below for an explanation of the Canadian context systems thinking community and the STVIC community within it.

STVIC Community Explained

Full Directory Access

Click below to view every registrant in the STVIC directory. Names are ordered alphabetically by the last name. By selecting a name, you can view the registrant’s Personal Bio.

View All Registrants

Taxonomies

To highlight some interesting characteristics of the STVIC community, we’ve created five searchable taxonomies where you can view registrants who are in your category of interest. Choose a taxonomy below, select a category inside it and discover who is there!

Canadian Provinces and Territories

Canada is the world’s second largest country with over one quarter of its land existing north of the treeline. It has the longest coastline in the world bordering three oceans: the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic. Canada’s geographic and sociocultural diversity is also apparent in the STVIC community. By selecting a province or territory, you can meet registrants who are learning systems thinking skills in local educational programs, practicing them in local professional work or simply living locally and building systems thinking skills through self-directed study, whether past or present. You may be surprised to see the diversity of systems thinkers within each Canadian region!

Alberta British Columbia Manitoba New Brunswick Newfoundland and Labrador Nova Scotia Ontario Prince Edward Island Quebec Saskatchewan Northwest Territories Nunavut Yukon

Decade Registrant Began
Building ST Skills

The study of System Sciences is widely considered to have been announced as a formal discipline in 1937 when Ludwig von Bertalanffy presented the preliminary concepts of General Systems Theory (GST). Important preceding concepts to GST were laid out by Alexander Bogdanov who had presented The Theory of Tectology by 1917. The name Systems Thinking (ST) was later adopted to define the diverse studies of practical applications of GST developing in parallel to GST itself since 1937. Many groups today use ST to describe both theoretical and applied studies. To gain a sense of the timeline of ST development in Canadian context it is helpful to know the decade since its inception in which each registrant began learning formal systems thinking skills. To uncover the Canadian context systems thinking “origin story” explore the Full In Tribute Archive that pays homage to the Canadian context systems thinkers passed away, whose shoulders we stand on today.

1937–1947 1947–1957 1957–1967 1967–1977 1977–1987 1987–1997 1997–2007 2007–2017 2017–2027

Practice Community

This refers to the educational community(ies) in which the STVIC registrant is building or practicing systems thinking (ST) skills. This includes formal institution-based and community-based education programs and informal self-directed learning, or all of these! On this website the following categories are used as search terms to help identify where the registrant is along their systems thinking journey.

The formal education programs include students communities in Secondary School, College/University Undergraduate, Polytechnic Institute, Graduate Studies and ST Learning Organization.

The category of Graduated Professionals includes registrants with professional qualifications in any field who are learning or practicing ST skills. This includes all professional educators who are teaching systems thinking skills to learners of any age.

The Lifelong Learner identifies people building systems thinking skills through self-directed individual learning. This includes students, graduated professionals, and citizens of any age building their skills through self-directed study using ST-themed personal learning sources such as books, ebooks, and online learning sources.

The In Tribute collection of STVIC registrants honours the Canadian context systems thinkers now passed on, who lived in the period during which System Science (later named Systems Thinking) was evolving after its announcement as a discipline in 1937. It includes the first wave of pioneers who were developing General Systems Theory, as well as those researching its first fields of application. STVIC also wishes to remember the early systems thinkers working during these first several decades who were practicing systems thinking concepts while unaware of the developing principles and terminology of the forming discipline. The practice communities named by STVIC for these registrants includes Professional Academia and Professional Activities to distinguish between activities taking place within organized academia and the many other organisation-based activities in which the pioneers could be involved.

Full In Tribute Archive

Secondary School College/University Undergraduate Polytechnic Institute Graduate Studies Graduated Professional ST Learning Organization Lifelong learner

Educational Subjects And Fields of Application

Because systems thinking skills is inherently cross disciplinary it is impossible to develop a complete list of the educational subjects and fields of application in which it is taught or practiced. The registrant has made up to three selections from the list below that are the most primary domains in which they are learning and applying systems thinking skills.

Languages and Methods

STVIC recognizes a growing view in the systems thinking community that the ST discipline can be described as a series of methods expressed through an expanding set of languages which can be hand drawn, computer generated and often both. This taxonomy shows a blended list of these languages and methods that are the tools each registrant uses for their systems thinking activities. A registrant can choose up to five categories in this taxonomy due to the multiple systems thinking tools they commonly use.