Systems thinking and innovation are deemed as required characteristic of systems engineers. This paper is written as the latest in a series of readings on systems thinking and innovation for postgraduate courses teaching systems engineering. The first part of the paper refers to earlier work in systems thinking and shows a difference between systems thinking and critical thinking, defines holis...

Ezhil is a Tamil programming language with support for imperative programming, with mixed use of Tamil and English identifiers and function-names. Ezhil programing system is targeted toward the K-12 (junior high-school) level Tamil speaking students, as an early introduction to thinking like a computer-scientist. We believe this 'numeracy' knowledge is easily transferred over from a native lang...

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...