a triarchy press publication
Growing Wings on the Way: Systems Thinking for Messy Situations by Rosalind Armson
Publication Date: 31st May 2011
No of pages: 338
Book type: Paperback
Print ISBN: 978-1-908009-36-4
List Price: £25
Offer Price: £19.50
Kindle Versions: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com
Epub Version: available here
This book is about dealing with messes. Sometimes known as 'wicked problems', messes (or messy situations) are fairly easy to spot:
- it's hard to know where to start
- we can't define them
- everything seems to connect to everything else and depends on something else having been done first
- we get in a muddle thinking about them
- we often try to ignore some aspect/s of them
- when we finally do something about them, they usually get worse
- they're so entangled that our first mistake is usually to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem.
Examples of messes might include:
- the healthcare system in your country ...
- dealing with a family break-up ...
- exploring change - and making it happen - in your organisation ...
- worrying about how to look after your elderly parents ...
Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways to approach these situations and unravel them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world's foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them. Specifically, she sets out a series of sophisticated and challenging - but practical and easily learned - skills and techniques for thinking better when you're 'in a mess'.
Read an extract from Chapter 3
The skills and techniques that she covers (with rules, advice and practical guidance on each one) in this book include:
- Escaping Mental Traps (including History Traps, Habit Traps, Double Binds, Value Rigidity and Action Traps)
- Working with System Definitions
- Diagnosing with Multiple-Cause Diagrams
- Drawing Rich Pictures
- Drawing and using Influence Diagrams
- Understanding messes with Systems Maps
- Building Human-Activity System Diagrams
- Using the 5Es of Efficacy, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Elegance and Ethicality
- Viewing messes through an Understandascope
Whether you're new to Systems Thinking or have long experience, the book invites you to develop your skills through working with your own messy situations. It's written for managers, project managers, team leaders, 'change leaders', strategists, policy makers and concerned citizens as well as university students from a broad set of disciplines. Organisations and readers in education, healthcare, environmental management, IT planning and social care are just a few of those likely to find it helpful.
About the author
Rosalind Armson is a systems practitioner, scholar and teacher, having worked for many years as Senior Lecturer in Systems at the Open University in Milton Keynes (UK). She has extensive experience of using systems ideas to support individuals and organisations facing complex and uncertain situations. She also supports students and others in learning Systems Thinking.
Rosalind and her colleagues have designed and delivered Systems Thinking courses to thousands of Open University students. She has a long-standing interest in how our thinking both enables and limits the opportunities we can see and take. She has worked with individuals, organisations and institutions seeking to survive and thrive in a world that presents enormous challenges. She is an independent consultant using her systems-thinking skills to enable others to work out what to do and how to do it. This has brought her into contact with development agencies, banks, governments, businesses, health-care practitioners, the voluntary sector, ethical monitoring agencies, energy providers and many others facing radical change. She aims to 'leave the skills behind' at the end of each consultancy engagement by building managers' systems-thinking capability.
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