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Context - systems thinking : Essential Readings
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Bob Williams (2009) "Thinking systematically", in Understanding Context, Capacity.org issue 37 (September 2009)
In an effort to identify the ‘bottom line’ commonalities that unite most of these schools of thought, Bob Williams traces the historical development of systems thinking and introduces some of the most commonly used concepts and methods.
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Peter Senge (1990 and 2006) The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization, Broadway Business
Credited with reviving the concept of systems thinking in the 1990s, Peter Senge’s landmark work describes systems thinking as the ability to see connections among cause–effect relationships that are related but separated in time and space.
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“Organism of Machine,” an article by Tony Land in Capacity.org issue 37, September 2009
Explains that it matters a great deal which metaphor for a system is chosen. Whereas adherents of the logframe approach implicitly use the metaphor of the machine - often with very disappointing results - Land argues that the metaphor of a living organism is much more promising.
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Cynefin: a sense of time and space, the social ecology of knowledge management David Snowden, in C. Despres and D. Chauvel, D. (eds) Knowledge Horizons: The Present and the Promise of Knowledge Management, Butterworth- Heinemann, 2000
Cynefin (Welsh for ‘habitat’) is a model used to describe problems, situations and systems. It provides a taxonomy that can be used to distinguish between simple, complicated, complex and chaotic situations, and corresponding ways – best, good, emergent and novel – to deal with them.
