[gond]

Please don’t use Design Thinking.

Design Thinking is a subset of Systems Thinking (this is the polite interpretation). Design Thinking does with its sole existence what Systems Thinking tried to avoid: Another category to put stuff into, divide and conquer. It is an over-simplified version of the original theories.

Better: Jump directly to Systems Thinking, Cybernetics and Systems Theory (and if measurements are more your thing, even try System Dynamics).

I can only recommend that anyone interested in this topic take a look at the work of one of the masters of Systems Thinking, Russel Ackoff:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6vrULecFI

This talk from 1991 is several dozen books heavily condensed into one hour.

(Russell Ackoff is considered one of the founders of Operations Research and ironically came to be regarded an apostate as he tried to reform the field he co-founded. He subsequently became a prominent figure of Systems Thinking)

My 2c. I'll show myself out.

[turnsout]

Design Thinking (and more broadly, human-centered design) is a pragmatic framework for doing product design in an effective and productive manner. Systems Thinking is a massively more general superset. I'm not really sure how you'd operationalize that on a design project, except by following first principles, which would essentially get you to DT / HCD.

[gond]

That is exactly the point.

Taking a theory (Systems Thinking), a mental model which has the primary goal of holistically identifying, describing, and understanding wholes and reducing it down to a set of methods/framework out of ease of use (the pragmatism) is exactly the wrong approach in my opinion.

Systems Thinking and all of its applications scenarios are based on epistemology. To turn it into a recipe is a wrongdoing. The whole notion is that one size does not fit all.

The operationalization of Systems Theory for a given case at hand is the responsibility and the transfer function of the operator whose approach this is. The process itself yields understanding and should not be abbreviated.

[baxtr]

Someone tried to explain systems thinking to me with respect to a planning effort we had.

I have to admit that it was very hard to me to follow what they were saying.

Maybe I’m dumb, maybe the person didn’t explain it well, or, maybe system thinking is really complex and thus hard to convey and use.

Design thinking on the other hand is easy to understand and apply.

[user_7832]

I have no idea what the exact topic is, but

> maybe system thinking is really complex and thus hard to convey and use.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. If you can follow how A leads to -> B, then that's about it all. Systems thinking is the same principle at a larger scale, with interesting side effects at times (eg network effects/group think/emergent phenomenon showing up).

[logicprog]

I've been very interested in cybernetics and systems thinking lately — would you be able to recommend some good books? I'm not afraid of difficult academic or philosophical reading, but I'm looking for stuff that's large in scope, applies to general fields, etc.

[gond]

There are so many subsets of the theory and I have no idea what would interest you and what you already know. Have you seen this paper?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220231906_The_Origi...

It leans a bit more on the cybernetic side but gives an overview and has what is possibly equally important as the text itself: some 7 pages of references. I started with openly accessible academic papers instead of books. If you find something interest there, you will surely have the direct reference to proceed further into that direction right at hand. Papers are shorter, you can switch the direction more easily. The price to pay is to miss the bigger picture a couple of times (which a book may convey) until some loose ends come together and create an aha moment.

(given what you said I would stay clear of all reinterpretations/popular science books. I would read something straight from the source, the people in the field, in whatever form it may show up.)

[eleventyseven]

Well my 0.2c: in that case it sounds like Systems Thinking is just a subset of Thinking when we live in a world of systems