systems-thinking

Systems Thinking

Role: structural analysis of complex systems. Tradition: Meadows / Senge / Forrester / Ackoff / Santa Fe Institute.

Five workflows

1. Iceberg (Iceberg model)

Layers downward: Events → Patterns → Structures → Mental Models.

🌊 What happened? (Events — visible)
    ↓
📊 How often does it happen? (Patterns — tendencies)
    ↓
🏗️ What in the structure produced it? (Structures — institutions, incentives, rules)
    ↓
🧠 What mental models support the structures? (Mental Models — assumptions)

Use for recurring problems: "Why does X keep happening?" The Iceberg reveals events as symptoms; the solution lies in structures or mental models.

2. CausalLoop (Causal Loop Diagrams)

Build diagrams with:

• Reinforcing loops (R) — self-amplifying (positive feedback)
• Balancing loops (B) — self-stabilising (negative feedback)

Output as a mermaid diagram:

graph LR
    A[Reliance on social media for news] -->|+| B[Algorithm-driven attention]
    B -->|+| C[Polarisation]
    C -->|+| A
    C -.->|R1| A

3. FindArchetype (10 canonical archetypes)

Match behaviour to known patterns:

1. Limits to Growth — growth hits a ceiling
2. Shifting the Burden — symptom-fix replaces root action
3. Tragedy of the Commons — shared resource overused
4. Fixes That Fail — short-term fix worsens the long term
5. Eroding Goals — goals lower when things get hard
6. Escalation — A's reaction provokes B, and vice versa
7. Success to the Successful — winners get more resources
8. Drifting Goals — gradual standard erosion
9. Growth and Underinvestment — growth without capacity investment
10. Accidental Adversaries — partners become opponents via misunderstanding

Identify the archetype → apply the canonical intervention.

4. FindLeverage (Meadows' 12 leverage points)

Ordered weakest → strongest:

1. Constants & parameters (weakest)
2. Buffer sizes
3. Stock-flow structures
4. Delays
5. Balancing feedback loops
6. Reinforcing feedback loops
7. Information flows
8. Rules
9. Self-organisation capacity
10. Goals
11. Paradigm
12. Power to transcend paradigms (strongest)

Application: policy work should aim for layers 5-1 for real impact, not 12-7 (which is what politics often does).

5. ConceptMap (Novak-style entity-relationship)

Hierarchical concept map:

• Overarching concept on top
• More specific downward
• Linking phrases between concepts ("causes", "amplifies", "part of")

Output as mermaid or hierarchical list.

Domain examples

Question	Workflow	Expected outcome
"Why does digital transformation keep failing?"	Iceberg	Mental models about "tech = solution" rather than organizational change
"Polarisation around social media"	CausalLoop	R-loop: attention → algorithm → polarisation → more attention
"Decline of defense spending pre-crisis"	FindArchetype	Eroding Goals (target lowered over decades)
"How to influence digital sovereignty in policy?"	FindLeverage	Aim for layers 5-3 (rules, goals, paradigm) not 12-10 (more money)

Integration with other skills

• thinking-firstprinciples to deconstruct mental models in Iceberg
• thinking-redteam to stress-test interventions from FindLeverage
• root-cause-analysis for incident cause chains (complementary — RCA is linear, systems-thinking is cyclic)

Output format

Mermaid diagrams for CausalLoop + ConceptMap. Structured markdown for Iceberg + FindArchetype + FindLeverage.

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🎯 COMPLETED: [SKILL:systems-thinking] [systems analysis of X] 🗣️ CUSTOM COMPLETED: [SKILL:systems-thinking] [Systems analysis done]