Systems Thinking: Inside and Out
Systems thinking can be broken down into conscious and unconscious. There are the deliberate practices you can implement, then there's the neural training you can etch in.
Einstein’s Brain
Albert Einstein's brain was removed for study shortly after his death. Various studies suggest there are some structural differences in his brain, perhaps brought on by mutations, that conferred such powerful mathematical abilities.
The area of the brain responsible for math is situated in the parietal lobe, a structure called the IPS (intraparietal sulcus). This won’t be on the test. However, what you do need to recognize is that calculus is not instinctive to humans. We learn to speak passively, almost by accident, just by virtue of the fact of exposure to ambient language and instinctive mimicry. Math, on the other hand, takes years to etch into our brains, and requires us to co-opt our visuospatial abilities, borrowing them to encode math.
Reading and writing is similarly not instinctive. While most of us are babbling away by age three or so, entirely of our own volition, it takes another few years to even grasp the rudiments of the alphabet and formal grammar. Our handwriting is blocky and unsure until our teenage years, and beyond if we don’t practice.
Why do I know this? Pretty much every systems thinker I have met and interviewed (north of three dozen at this point) knows a ton about their own brain and pedagogy. Systems thinkers tend to be fascinated with their own brain, learning about it in an abstract, academic sense as well as a first-hand user-manual kind of sense. We’re all psychonauts, and have a propensity for language, psychology, or education. After all, our brains are our most powerful assets, so would it not behoove us to develop our own user manual for this remarkable engine?
Many kinds of intelligence and reasoning are innate and instinctual. Some, as elucidated above, must be practiced and drilled in, literally etched into our brains by forcibly rewiring our lobes. I am coming to believe that systems thinking, like calculus, banks on some of those natural abilities, but heavily relies on co-opting various neural structures. I have no physical evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps in a few years when AGI and NeuraLink takes off, I will be vindicated.
In the meantime, my personal study of systems thinking, and my study of systems thinkers, have led me to believe that there is a strong genetic component, a penchant or predisposition for systems thinking, as well as an acquired aspect. Nature and nurture. Just as a small child may show a natural affinity for math or art, no one is born as an Einstein or Picasso.
A Tale of Two Dispositions
As I’ve continued to reflect on and refine my mental model of “what is systems thinking, anyways?” I have come to believe that systems thinking can be divided into two broad categories: conscious and unconscious. These tags may not be the best labels, but they are good enough for now. Let me explain.
The “conscious” category of systems thinking are all the deliberate behaviors that you can easily do. These are tactics and strategies that can help you solve problems, organize knowledge, and communicate effectively with people. These are activities like performing a SWOT analysis, updating a RACI matrix, or deploying CFD weather models (we sure do love acronyms!) that you can deliberately and consciously choose to employ. Pretty much anyone can learn them, and every field and discipline has a veritable treasure trove of acronyms, frameworks, and methodologies that you will learn. Heck, one of the cornerstones of systems thinking is simply accumulating all the correct jargon for a particular field! Picking up all the mental tools is half the battle.
These conscious behaviors are largely about structure. That’s what an acronym does, provide mnemonic structure that allows you to fall back on simple ideas, first principles thinking, and standardize your approach over time. Sprint reviews, Agile cycles, and scrum teams - all exactly the same. Imposing structure amidst chaos. Much of the conscious side of systems thinking is about the behaviors that deliberately find the signal in the noise.
Confusion is the villain. Clarity is the hero.
The above quotation is a distillation from one of the dozens of conversations I’ve had with systems thinkers. The purpose of systems thinking is to maximize clarity and reduce confusion. There are a million ways to go about this, but if I had to render a succinct definition of systems thinking, it would probably include this sentiment. Many of my conversations orbited around the problem of how do you discern the signal from the noise? How do you determine that you’ve tuned into the right signal, and then once you have, what do you do with that information?
A prime example was when I spoke with a business consultant whose specialty was process improvement. On one particular job, they were tasked with bringing costs down for a client’s company. In this case, the overarching signal was money - the bottom line. Money is such a useful invention. In this case, it was serving as a “unit of account” - an abstraction of value to account for loss of efficiency and productivity due to structural problems with the shipping department. Of course, there are many factors that influence the bottom line, both directly and indirectly.
This consultant sat with their VP of logistics one day and just watched the loading docks, like David Attenborough waiting for the one natural moment, where the small critter emerges from its burrow, or when the predator strikes. After logging all the comings and goings for a couple of days, this consultant noticed a pattern: There was a lot of waiting, followed by a lot of activity all at once.
It turned out that their trucks were all arriving at the same time, and would then spend hours and hours waiting to be unloaded and reloaded. Meanwhile, the dock crew was sitting around doing nothing for hours, until they were backed up. To compound matters, their trucks billed per hour, so they were essentially paying double or triple (depending on how you count it). They had found the signal in the noise. In this case, the signal was downtime. To minimize downtime, they had to titrate their truck schedules so the dock crew could work slowly and steadily, and to minimize the time the trucks were queued up.
Now, anyone familiar with the law of constraints will immediately understand what happened here. There is always a bottleneck. It’s just a matter of where that bottleneck is, and how to alleviate it. Now, rejiggering the trucking schedules cleared up one bottleneck, and of course they’d go on to find another one somewhere else, but now they had a KPI they could measure ever and anon - downtime and wait time.
That’s the signal in the noise.
These are all the conscious behaviors: watching, gathering data, developing and testing KPI…
What about the unconscious part?
Training Your Brain
Just as you wouldn’t expect a toddler to pick up a pen and scribe the next great novel, nor would you even expect a teenager to be the next Einstein, likewise, you should not expect any old untrained brain to be the next Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mr. Beast, or David Shapiro.
Us systems thinkers are crafted over many years of training. Yes, we do have a natural inclination towards systems thinking (it tends to run in families) however, there are countless other behaviors we engage in that develop these systems thinking muscles over time. Just as an athlete needs to learn oodles about breathing, diet, recovering, posture, and other stuff not directly related to their running or cycling, so to does any systems thinker need to cross-train their brain and learn how to use their mind.
Your brain is like a Ferrari, or a jetfighter if you like. Yes, it’s incredibly powerful, arguably the most powerful device ever conjured by evolution! But, without training and a user manual, you have only your intuition on how to use it. Sure, you could fiddle around with the controls and, over time, develop a sense of the thing. After all, that’s how most of us learn. Hands-on-training.
But like the Mentats in Frank Herbert’s Dune, I also believe that you can be very deliberate about training your brain to think in certain ways. Just as Einstein spent a few decades etching advanced theoretical math into his neural circuits, and as all of us have etched literacy into our brains (just the fact that you’re reading this means that you have already proven that you can hijack your neural machinery and encode non-instinctive abilities! Congrats, you’re well on your way to being a Mentat!) I also have come to believe that just about anyone, with practice and diligence, can etch systems thinking into their brain.
Creativity & Humanities
It’s long been established that thought leaders in any industry cross-train and cross-pollinate their brains. It’s quite sad, but many people in STEM fields end up looking down their noses at other fields as “not real science.” This is a basic status game, where there’s an imaginary lexicon of prestige and purity. Math and physics people tend to see their field as more pure and prestigious than computer science: a physicist friend of mine once read my book on cognitive architecture and said that it was “well written…to be accessible to the intended audience.” He went on to say that physics is much harder to grasp. Likewise, because other fields like language and philosophy are less empirical, the humanities in general are often shat upon by STEM majors.
As a public figure in the space of AI, I cannot tell you how many times college students messaged me on LinkedIn asking how to round out their education. Many of them were flat out offended when I told them they needed to master language. The revulsion in their messages was telling.
“Why would I master language? Just to like… communicate with people better?” (actually got this in response once)
Well, yes. Communication is the single most valuable skill anyone can have, so it’s worth it on that front alone. But also, we’re in the age of Large Language Models. Every prompt engineer I know who’s taken to it like a duck to water has come from the humanities. Philosophers, linguists, librarians, English majors… they all take to prompt engineering as naturally as breathing. Engineers… not so much.
As a polymath, I really cannot fathom why so many people intellectually shoot themselves in the foot - cutting off their nose to spite their face - for the sake of intellectual pedantry and frivolous status games. To me, it appears like people are virtue signalling their stupidity, akin to shouting “Look how narrowly trained I am! This is clearly the superior path!”
You can probably tell I still have some grievances with the modern education system.
All knowledge is worth having.
Just as learning math and programming is difficult, it trains your brain to think in different ways. So to does, say, learning to write speculative fiction, play tennis, or study philosophy. Many people seem to mistakenly believe that this cross-pollination comes at the expense of their main career or intellectual pursuits, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
All Olympians cross-train. Mental and otherwise. Cyclists who compete in the Tour de France also swim or run. Just as an athlete will round out their body’s physical training, so to should any aspiring systems thinker seek to round out their mental fitness.
I once tried to explain this to a friend of mine, an oceanographer, who could not fathom why I “wasted” time writing novels. I have yet to publish my first novel, and so I have not made any money on it. Whether or not my novel is a commercial success on its own is immaterial. The act of writing my novel has propelled me very high - much higher than I could have ever dreamed - because of the skills and practice it gave me. My philosophy of Postnihilism would not exist without my novel, and neither would my career in AI in the first place. My friend could only see my novel as instrumental to more utilitarian ends.
“Oh, so you used it to get better at science and technology?”
Well, no, not really. Trust me, you cannot write fifteen drafts of a novel unless you love the act of writing. You must do creative things for their own sake, for the love of them. Rather, if one must look at engaging creatively from an instrumental perspective, think of it as “allowing yourself to indulge, with marked side benefits.” That same friend of mine who could not grasp why I invested any of my valuable mental powers in writing fiction is the self-same friend who loves men’s aesthetics, classy watches, and fashion.
Nobody tell him ;)
After all, why spend any of his considerable mental prowess on something so trivial and frivolous as understanding the various cuts of jackets and models of watches when he could be modeling atmospheric data for NASA?
Math & Programming
Most systems thinkers already came up through some form of STEM or business. I came up through IT, switched to automation, and then AI. Having had a broad cross-section of pretty much all technology, I learned to “think like a machine.” However, pretty much any scientist or engineer of any stripe will have developed similar understandings. Likewise, many business consultants learn to abstract and model businesses in a similar manner. Systems, networks, structures, rules, and abstractions - these are all universal across many disciplines.
I spoke to agronomists, teachers, engineers, and recruiters in my study of systems thinking. Every single one of them uses abstract reasoning, generalizations, network thinking, and pattern recognition (just to name a few). These are the cognitive building blocks of systems thinking. Just like how a stride or a stroke is the building block of the runner or swimmer, your mental gymnastics are cobbled together from many disparate cognitive abilities.
Just as I would argue that every person in STEM must have at least one creative (right-brained) hobby, so to should every creative person have a left-brained hobby. Marilyn Monroe, famous actress and centerfold, was an intellectual who loved reading. My wife, an avid reader and writer (and perennial “lore bard”) now works in STEM but her true passion is in the arts.
One year, she decided to deliberately learn math and programming. This was during her undergrad. So, as a librarian-in-training who understood rhetoric and all the old ways of learning, built a curriculum for herself, intentionally learning all the mental abilities that allowed her to engage in more advanced math and even computer programming. She didn’t enjoy it, and by no means is she an expert in calculus or Python, but the cross-training was more than enough to land her a job in a big data tech company.
Likewise, my sister-in-law, who much prefers to be working with people and being outdoors, is getting her degree in math. Rather than doubling down on her natural strengths, she’s been inching towards this career for a while. It is difficult for her, but she finds it fascinating and it is restructuring her brain in such a way that it will give her new and unique cognitive abilities. She’s learned SAS and data science in pursuit of this degree, and while it has nothing to do with her true passions - people and outdoors - it is very much a worthy pursuit.
I feel as though it would be silly to continue to extol the virtues of STEM, given that we live in a world that presently valorizes STEM above all else. You get the idea.
People Skills
All systems are human systems. As one systems thinker put it: “It’s just people all the way down.”
Every system is built by and for humans. Yes, the lone programmer sifting through mountains of code might never need to interact with humans, but the software they are building is ultimately in service to humans. Many people, particularly those in STEM, due to the aforementioned status games, invest little to no skill points in communication. Now, that’s not to dunk only on STEM folks - after all, many of the systems thinkers I interviewed were in STEM fields. Many were not. There were also business and education.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, most systems thinkers seem to have a natural curiosity about the human condition. In some cases, such as myself, it’s because we’ve always been different - neurospicy people tend to find personality theory fascinating. When you never really fit in, and you’re naturally curious, you tend to want to understand why. But there are plenty of people who are not neurospicy who are also natural social scientists. They intrinsically find people fascinating and want to understand how to interact with them and what makes them tick.
“Relationships yield results.”
The above axiom was given to me by one of my interviewees. This is probably the single best distillation of why people skills matter to systems thinkers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a physicist, or a content creator, everything comes down to understanding people. How to negotiate with them, enforce boundaries, navigate conflict, entice them with offers, and so on. Rhetoric is underrated.
Now, if you’re not familiar with “people skills” you might just have a mental image of someone vaguely good at schmoozing, so here’s a more rigorous list (lists are the beginning of systems thinking!) of what I mean when I say “people skills”:
Verbal Communication: Expressing yourself clearly and eloquently in person, on zoom meetings, and so on. This empowers you to lead meetings, meet new people, give presentations, host Webinars, and make YouTube videos. Elocution and rhetoric. Join a Toastmasters club!
Written Communication: You’re reading it! The ability to put pen to paper and transmit wisdom from one brain to another via symbolic inscriptions (aka writing) is humanity’s greatest superpower. I will die on this hill. At the end of one’s career, after they’ve accumulated decades of experience and insight, they can capture their life’s work in a few hundred pages, and duplicate that wisdom. My bookshelf has over ten thousand years of accumulated wisdom on it.
Negotiation and Boundaries: It might not be intuitive as to why these go together, but they do. Being able to navigate towards your goal, to find mutually beneficial solutions, to establish, enforce, and respect boundaries - these are quintessential skills for navigating the world. The number one reason I cut people out of my life is because they have poor boundaries. Boundaries are non-negotiable. (if this assertion confuses you, I recommend reading The Power of a Positive No by William Ury)
Conflict Navigation: Any time two or more people interact for any length of time, conflict is bound to arise. This is true for spouses, children, business partners, friends, collaborators - everyone you interact with is a potential source of conflict. It behooves you to know how to handle it. Your life will be infinitely better for it.
Emotional Literacy: Emotions are hard and we are living in an era of unironic toxic Stoicism wherein many men believe the answer is less emotional literacy, not more. There are many great aspects of Stoicism - discipline and purpose and structure. Even the most positive versions of Stoicism, however, only treat emotions as a byproduct to be managed, not a source of valuable information or richness of life. Just visit the subreddit BoomersBeingFools if you want to see what happens when a generation does not value emotional literacy.
Human Nature: We are social apes. We have baseline organic needs, emergent social and intellectual abilities, and countless inherited abilities and proclivities. Enlightenment and Modernist thought asserted that we were superior, detached from nature, but this was a bad idea. Check out The Status Game by Will Storr for the single best read on human nature. Braintrust by Patricia Churchland if you want a second book.
As a human, knowing more about communicating with humans will help you live a better, more connected life. But, instrumentally, it will propel your career to new heights. From a neurological perspective, it will give you new cognitive tools with which to employ your systems thinking muscles.
Be a Dilettante
I used to identify as a polymath. Yeah, that was rather pretentious of me. I’m past the bottom of the Dunning-Kruger curve and now I’m more aware of how much I don’t know, rather than believing I know almost everything ;)
“There’s a big difference between being a polymath and dilettante”
What’s funny about this criticism (that I actually received) is that any well-read person today is orders of magnitude more well-informed than any polymath of the Renaissance. Did you know that the original university education was considered… well universal? Also, everyone had the same curriculum. Once you matriculated, you had the same level of education as everyone else who’d passed through that university.
Talk about credential inflation…
Whatever you call yourself today, polymath, dilettante, dabbler, or just curious - my recommendation is this: read broadly. Whatever tickles your fancy. Cultivate a sense of genuine, childlike curiosity.
Because of the status games in competitive cultures, from high pressure college towns to academic gatekeeping, many people feel like it is sacrilege to step “out of their lane.”
Your lane is the entire pool. As a systems thinker, the more you know, the more powerful you are. Again, it boggles my mind how academia has created such anti-intellectual conditions and patterns such as gatekeeping knowledge. I mean, I do know. It’s because we’re social apes, and social status games underpin almost everything we do. But that doesn’t make it any less aggravating, bewildering, or stupid.
Yes, as recently as a few months ago, my tagline on LinkedIn included the words “transdisciplinary polymath.” Ultra pretentious, I know. Now I just call myself a systems thinker.
Most of the systems thinkers I interviewed were also dilettantes, or polymaths, or dabblers. We tend not to respect academic and intellectual silos. We are gatecrashers. Our status game is not predicated upon cloistered mastery, but the depth and breadth of our knowledge. Rather than pathologizing curiosity (seriously, I hate modern education) we valorize curiosity. We don’t punish people for expressing interest in fields outside their domain, nor do we demand credentials to judge whether or not someone is qualified to speak on an issue.
Knowledge is knowledge, irrespective of what any stuffy old institution tells you who is a master or not. We care more about the horsepower of our mental Ferrari engines than the social status games and trappings of “intellectualism.”