a recent international journal of health policy and management (ijhpm) article by fadi el-jardali and colleagues makes an important contribution to the literature on health system strengthening by reporting on a survey of healthcare stakeholders in low- and middle-income countries (lmics) about systems thinking (st). the study’s main contributions are its confirmation that healthcare stakeholde...

This article describes an approach to bridging the gap between the generalist thinking of decision makers and the specialism of modellers by concentrating on the preliminary issue conceptualisation stage of modelling. A new type of visual facilitation is described using hexagons as a flexible mapping technique to bridge the gap between thoughts and models. A typical team application is describe...

Systems thinking is one form that interdisciplinarity has adopted since the middle of the twentieth century. It is a catchall term for different postwar developments in a variety of fi elds, such as cybernetics, information theory, game and decision theory, automaton theory, systems engineering, and operations research. These developments concur, however , inasmuch as, in one way or another, th...

Within the systems movement, several strands and different sub-movements have developed in the last two or three decades. One of them is the “critical systems approach” which opposes certain assumptions and methodological and practical implications of the so-called hard and soft systems approaches. The most essential characteristics of the approach are its critical standpoint against exclusion ...

T his article presents the essentials of a successful counterinsurgency strategy by applying a technique known as systems thinking. The fundamentals of good strategic thought lie both in recognizing the most significant interactions between different players, how they influence each other in unexpected ways, and how to measure progress in achieving the ends of the strategy. Systems thinking has...

The object of this interpretive inquiry is the residential aged care Standards structure and the Standards quality accreditation (assessment/ auditing) processes. The author’s concern is whether or not the application of contemporary systems thinking principles could improve the current Standards and accreditation processes. Contemporary systems thinking is a variant of systems theory and criti...

In this article, I discuss some recent ideas in complex systems on the topic of networks, contained in or inspired by three recent complex systems books. The general science of networks is the subject of Albert-Lazlo Barabási’s Linked [A.-L. Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus, New York, 2002] and Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees [D. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Ag...