Understanding of System Thinking

According to Wikipedia, System thinking is any process of estimating or inferring how local policies, actions, or changes influence the state of the neighboring universe. It considers the linkages and interactions between the elements that make up the whole system rather than the details of all the consisting components. People with systems thinking will believe that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other rather than in isolation. Systems thinking techniques may be used to study any kind of system — natural, scientific, engineered, human, or conceptual.

After I get those concepts from Wikipedia, one typical example quickly came up to my mind. It is the principle of traditional Chinese medical science . The t raditional Chinese medical science emphasizes that our body is a whole system. When there is a problem in our body, physicians will think that some parts of the body are out of the natural operating system. So they will focus on strengthening the whole body system and heal the problem with the regulation of our body system naturally. It is essential for physicians to apply system thinking technique since our body is the complicated and interactive system. If we just focus on the specific parts, we will probably miss the running of the whole system.

Actually, beside our body system, most other useful systems, like computer operating system, company operating system and so on, are rather complicated. It is impossible for us to go into every detail of the components of the system. But we can come up with a structure to make every components cooperate better. On another hand, although all components are the best, they cannot work well without a good system. Also, it is ineffective for us to engage in solving all the detail of the problems. That why system thinking is an important intelligence for us.

So how can we enhance our system intelligence? Engineering learning is one of the good ways.

Engineering course provide us a lot of chance to enhance our system intelligence.

For IEG1001, we can get the basic understanding of system thinking. It is the important beginning. If we do not have a basic concept of it, we will never know put it into consideration. Even if we may use the system thinking occasionally, we will never know what it is and why we should think in that way. After the course, we will try to practice the system thinking whenever we encounter some tasks.

Moreover, when doing the experiments of Electronic Circuit Design Laboratory , although we may not know all the working principles of the devices, we will try our best to connect the devices to carry out the experiments. Also, when we find mistakes in the experiment, we will firstly analyze the data got from the system and then locate the mistakes. It is a good training of system thinking since we are actually working out a system to acquire what we need and review the feedback of the system and find out the problem.

The most evident example is program learning. When we do the program assignment, we can never do the specific parts first. It is because some of them may not be necessary in the entire program and some identifiers may not be able to connect to another part. In order to avoid numerous warnings and errors, we need to come up with the main flow first. So we can connect all the detail functions together to complete the task effectively. Our system intelligence will enhance whenever we think about the flow.

To sum up, system thinking is an important intelligence for our self-development. We are lucky that we have a lot of chance to enhance it. We should cherish all the chance to practice more. It will certainly pave the way for our success.