Does this pretty much boil down to "if we poke it here, what will it do?"
Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
51–60 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#52Try to track what exactly are you doing for a month, every day, with 20-min steps, and think of your time spending budget in the end of each week with data and figures. You will be amazed how your mindset will change towards systems thinking in the end of the third month of this practice. You really will be. Be persistent, that’s the only pre-requisite and requirement for this indispensable exercise. Its origin is late Taylorian self-monitoring practice designed by Gastev in 1923, and it rocks. http://www.leanok.ru/2015/01/hronokarta-po-gastevu.html
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#53Russ Ackoff's "Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management" di Russell L. Ackoff. http://a.co/6LvRWPO And also Ackoff's talks on Systems Thinking: https://youtu.be/EbLh7rZ3rhU
Oh how I remember Ackoff. Required reading for undergrad Systems Design Eng. What is a system..., Good times
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't see how a simple input/output streaming model would be helpful in understanding systems theory and design? There are a _lot_ of systems out there that tie together various components with tools that behave a lot like jq (or literally are jq...)
Yes this is how every Unix command line utility works. There is nothing unique about jq in this regard, and there is nothing particularly “systems thinking” about any of them. You can and people have used them for decades without doing any special “systems thinking”.
The Unix model is really useful in my systems thinking precisely because thousands of components all use the stream in/out approach. This made then reliable within a system to be used together in many different combinations and interactions.
Also a good example of loose coupling that allows for good thinking of systems.
In school we watched the 1990 movie [MindWalk](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100151/). You can watch it on YouTube https://youtu.be/Uec1CX-6A38
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#55I don't have any specific links, but ISTR that INCOSE has a lot of publications & recommended practices, etc. However, nothing beats working with an experienced Systems Engineer (as in: someone with a degree in Systems Engineering who has practiced it for many years) if you have the opportunity. I learned something every day working with those guys.
https://www.incose.org/ProductsPublications/Papers-Presentat...
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#56Overcomplicated Building Evolutionary Architecture The Checklist Manifesto The Half Life of Data How Buildings Learn I recommend looking into anything around processes or process-building/management, project management, how incentives work, and how the brain works. The natural world and the corporate world are great examples of systems in action.
Seconded the Checklist Manifesto.
Checklist Manifesto is a great (and short/easy) read that I also recommend, but I don't think it's going to be especially helpful to someone looking for techniques to develop new systems thinking models.
At most, it's a recounting of someone else's very specific systems work that has some unexpectedly strong outcomes from surprisingly simple drivers.
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#57I find the visibly distinct split in recommendations to be fascinating. Of the books I've read, Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World is the best all-round introduction to both the theory and practice of systems thinking. There are a lot of books and as a family of related fields, systems have historically attracted creative and iconoclastic thinkers. That can be fun, but also…
As an aside, I see that while amazon.com currently lists them quite highly priced right now, alibris.com can find some much cheaper versions. Second hand prices on amazon are sometimes surprisingly high, and sometimes, their new prices too - I routinely check bookdepository, wordery, booksplea.se, agreatread, thriftbooks, abebooks and alibris - each of them bests the others and Amazon frequently enough to keep checking them all. My list of sites to check is UK focused, but I expect there are US equivalents.
Looks like alibris will do a copy of the book in question for a bit under 20 USD as I type, with some searching around.
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#58I find the visibly distinct split in recommendations to be fascinating. Of the books I've read, Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World is the best all-round introduction to both the theory and practice of systems thinking. There are a lot of books and as a family of related fields, systems have historically attracted creative and iconoclastic thinkers. That can be fun, but also…
Abebooks lists several copies in the 20-25 USD price range though. Some even with CD-Rom... they all seem to be “International Edition” whatever this means.
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#59Perhaps this would interest only EU hackers .. but I think it’s going to be extremely interesting as a “system design/theory” problem. There is the GDPR regulation going to kick off in May 2018. Simply put it regulates how an organization has to handle personal data. And that is a huge deal. The task is: Make the organization GDPR compliant. Does anyone has a suggestion how to approach such a task from the most gener…
GDPR interests US hackers too. I'm currently working on a SAAS that helps companies manage their data privacy, with GDPR being the main driver. I can't say much about our approach just yet as we're in stealth mode still, but imho the approach should be centered around awareness of what, where, and how data is stored. That's the very first step.
Re: Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?
#60I find the visibly distinct split in recommendations to be fascinating. Of the books I've read, Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World is the best all-round introduction to both the theory and practice of systems thinking. There are a lot of books and as a family of related fields, systems have historically attracted creative and iconoclastic thinkers. That can be fun, but also…
Abebooks lists several copies in the 20-25 USD price range though. Some even with CD-Rom... they all seem to be “International Edition” whatever this means.
"International Edition" generally means printed significantly more cheaply, and not intended for sale within "rich countries"; generally countries where they can realistically push the expensive version. International Editions often say on them "Not for sale in the US" or some such, depending on the publisher; they sell in poorer countries at a lower price.
The quality is often, in my experience, significantly lower; the paper is thinner, the ink cheaper, sometimes the alignment of the printing is a little off. Colour plates are missing or decoloured, hardbacks become softbacks, and so on. But, the words are the same, and sometimes the International Edition is actually pretty reasonable quality. I've got some that are clearly pretty shoddy, and some that you wouldn't actually know were Internationals. I suspect that sometimes publishers don't reprint it cheaply; they just stamp some of them "International Edition, not for sale in countries " on it and ship them abroad to sell, much as some semiconductor manufacturers' cheaper chips actually come off the same line as the expensive ones, and then get tweaked (or even just labelled down). A sale is a sale.