Collaborative Systems Thinking Research: Exploring systems thinking within teams

This paper describes ongoing research that seeks to develop an empirical basis for collaborative systems thinking, defined as “an emergent behavior of teams resulting from the interactions of team members and utilizing a variety of thinking styles, design processes, tools, and communication media to consider system attributes, interrelationships, context and dynamics towards executing systems design”. This type of thinking is critically important to addressing engineering systems challenges, and the research seeks to inform and enable effective systems engineering practice in contemporary engineering enterprises. Focusing on the aerospace domain, collaborative systems thinking is examined through the alignment of enterprise culture and standard technical processes. This paper draws on a variety of literature to compose a definition of collaborative systems thinking and propose a research agenda going forward.