Understanding Systems Thinking from the Perspectives of Experience and Diversity

To be or not to be a systems thinker: Do professional characteristics influence how students acquire systems-thinking skills?

“…The connection between work experience and systems thinking has been broadly studied. Padhi et al (2018) found that a diversity of practice areas and experience improve systems-thinking skills. When people are highly experienced in varied fields, they have a greater capacity for systems thinking, and vice versa.…”

“…Previous studies have revealed different processes and factors that affect systems thinking. They include experience (Beasley, 2012;Kordova and Frank, 2018;Padhi et al, 2018), systems-thinking practice (Kim and Senge, 1994), teaching systems thinking (Assaraf and Orion, 2005;Camelia et al, 2015), developing a learning culture (Sambrook and Stewart, 2000) and the managerial level, degree of involvement in the working environment, type of employer, and level of education (Nagahi et al, 2020). Below, we examine the effects of these and other factors on the four groups following a systems-thinking learning process.…”

“…Practicing systems thinking Kim and Senge (1994) Learning from experience is one of the key factors that enable systems thinking Davidz et al (2005) Personal analysis, personality, talent, task management, and experience influence systems thinking. Davidz (2006) Experience in engineering-based teamwork in a natural work environment can enable one to apply materials learned in class, collaboration, communication, and planning Valerdi and Zonnenshain (2012) Acquiring experience on a wide range of work issues, changing positions, and becoming familiar with diverse technological systems can improve systems-thinking capabilities Kordova and Frank (2015) Implementing projects improve CEST Frank and Koral-Kordova (2016) Training, diverse work experience, and certain personality traits can improve systems-thinking abilities Frank and Koral-Kordova (2016) Diversity of practice areas and experience have an impact on developing skills for systems thinking Padhi et al (2018) Using practical experience Kordova and Frank (2018) A project that combines active learning strategies and actual financial data, internal auditing, and project management help to develop systems thinking…”

Impact of Imperfect Repairs and Diagnostic Coverage on the Reliability of Multi-Channel IEC-61850 Substation Communication Network

“…Structure-function determines the possible states of the system while the Markov process enables the development of the system state transition matrix, which can also be depicted by a state transition diagram to ease the comprehension of the system dynamics [1], [5], [14]. The Markov state transition probability diagram further also enables the use of Systems Thinking to integrate imperfect repairs and diagnostic capability factors into the model in order to accurately evaluate the reliability of the system [9], [15], [16]. The drawback of the Markov process is that it assumes that the failure rates of the components are stochastic [5], [17].…”

System Architecture, the Missing Piece of Engineering Education

“…Their findings found that system thinking could be taught but will tend to develop slowly in practitioners. These findings were confirmed in [27] who found that the system thinking development time was more correlated to the diversity of systems a practitioner was exposed to, than time spent on a given system. In [25], it was also found that systems thinking could be taught but the authors pointed out that the current educational system is an inhibitor to systems thinking education because schools are structured for students to find the correct answer over possibility exploration, and for memorization over problem solving.…”