Systems Thinking 101

Hi everyone! It’s been a couple of years since I last blogged, and I’ve decided to revive the practice during my sabbatical, with a new focus. I’m still on the tenure track (now with tenure!), and I’m still a mom, and I’m still passionate about seeing an academia that represents all of us. I’m also a systems scientist, meaning that I use systems thinking and modeling to try to find solutions to complex problems such as food insecurity, deforestation, and climate change.

Systems thinking means understanding that the structure of a system—the ways in which the different parts interact with one another—determines the behavior of the system. One of my favorite examples is baking a cake. If you were to taste all of the cake ingredients separately—the eggs, the flour, the sugar, the vanilla—you would have no idea how the final cake would taste. The taste is the product of the interactions of all of these separate components in the heat of the oven.

Similarly, many of the problems we face as a country, or as a global society, are systems problems. One example is our country’s problem with what we eat. Our poor diets hurt our health, as we see in the high and increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. To address the problem, most of us focus on shifting individual behaviors, but individual behavior and how individuals make choices are only a part of the system. The choices we make are always determined and constrained by the environment, and the food environment in our country has unique characteristics which make it difficult to sustain a healthy diet. The time to cook healthy food is scarce, junk food is cheap and plentiful, and restaurant meals are frequently very unhealthy. All of these factors are outside of any single individual’s control, but they certainly contribute to our unhealthy diets. Do individual choices and behavior matter? Absolutely. But so do the environmental factors. The environmental factors may even matter more. Considering either in isolation—like separating the ingredients of the cake—is not going to help us understand how to  reach the goal of good food and health for everyone.

In this moment of history, the need for systems thinking in American society is urgent. The mix of ingredients in our allegorical cake is changing, and so are their interactions. We are facing extremely challenging and complex problems, including the need to provide good jobs for everyone while preserving the integrity of our environment; and addressing deep-seated social and economic inequalities. The current lack of systems thinking in public discourse will not let us solve, or even appropriately frame, these types of problems. Our current political situation has only reinforced my belief that systems thinking is badly needed in the body politic (I will write more about that in the next post).

So, fair warning—this blog will be political. It’s hard to avoid that in my line of work. In this era, affirming the scientific evidence for climate change is considered a political statement. However, please notice that I said ‘political’ and not ‘partisan’. Throughout my career I have worked with a wide variety of people from different ideological perspectives interested in applying systems thinking to complex problems. Anyone who sincerely wants to address these problems is more than welcome to contribute, comment and discuss.

So welcome, and thanks for reading!