Every aspect of our lives is involved in a system whether it is our day-to-day routine, the organisation, which we choose to work for, our approach to dealing with challenging situations and these principles can be applied in many environments including the care of others. Systems' thinking originates from view point that areas, subjects or processes work together in a relationship, to achieve and improve processes for the overall organisation. By being able to recognise these systems we can focus on facts, not theories, and can look at a problem or issue understanding better where it came from, why it happened, and how to improve it. "Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes, recognising patterns and interrelationships, and learning how to structure those interrelationships in more effective efficient ways" (Kim :1991)
The approach of systems thinking is fundamentally different from that of traditional forms of analysis. Traditional analysis focuses on the separation of the individual pieces of which is being studied; the word "analysis" can be defined as meaning "to break into constituent parts." (UNPD: Webpage) Systems’ thinking, in contrast, focuses on how the subject being studied interacts with the other members of the system, and looks at how processes can be improve behaviour of which it is a part.
Senge (1990) defines systems thinking as the "fifth discipline." The fifth discipline integrates four other disciplines - shared vision, personal mastery, mental models and team learning.
This means that instead of isolating smaller parts of the system being studied, systems thinking works by expanding its view to take into account larger numbers of interactions or processes and studies a wider field. It views the big picture and interprets cause and effect. This results in sometimes strikingly different conclusions than those generated by traditional forms of analysis, especially when what is being studied is dynamically complex or has a great...