Impediments to Systems Thinking: Communities Separated by a Common Language

Systems-thinking requires participants to view problems, and their solutions, within the context of the overall system. When this involves participants from diverse professional communities, several barriers to effective communication can arise. As in all human communities, shorthand representations, such as specialized jargon, that aid in efficient and precise communications have developed. These shorthands rely on the common background of the participants, including common knowledge, perceptions, and assumptions about the field and its concepts, capabilities, and limitations. These shorthands can become a source of miscommunication when participants are from different communities. The development of concurrent coding theory has brought members of the network, information assurance, and communications communities together in ways unfamiliar to most. This is due to the manner in which the theory is applied to omnidirectional communications to mitigate hostile jamming without the use of shared secrets. Being novel and unconventional, several conflicting assumptions have been exposed. Here we discuss our experiences in recognizing, analyzing, and overcoming many of these misconceptions, including our own, despite how surprisingly resilient some of them have proven to be. However, by adopting a systems-thinking approach and drawing upon most peoples’ innate ability to think analogically, we have significantly improved our ability to convey our key concepts.