Systems Thinking vs Design Thinking
I’d like to reflect on adopting principles of system thinking and design thinking to solve complex and daily problems. Some people may think you can either apply a system thinking approach or a design thinking approach to solve a problem and that both of these approaches are mutually exclusive of each other. But as I see it, a good balance of both these approaches may be best to yield the most positive results.
The design thinking steps are integrated with the system’s thinking fundamentals, and I consider this whole system as its unity and not in isolation. When I want to use this approach in a personal life, let’s say I’ve identified myself to be maybe unhappy at a current job and that’s a problem that I want to solve. How would I approach this problem from understanding the user’s needs (design thinking) perspective? The first step is to get very critical to understand the root of the problem before jumping into the solution. Most of these needs are identified by asking the right questions, mainly questions I’ve not asked myself before. For instance, if I’m not happy at my job, my instinct reflex reaction may be that I should find a different job and I should quit this job. But the truth is, maybe I don’t like this job because I prefer working as a freelancer or an entrepreneur, or because I don’t like my job as I’m not as qualified as I should be, and I may spend my time better by qualifying more skills instead. So, another way to understand the user in this case.
Now to take a system thinking approach for that and to analyse myself from end to end. An example could be taking a time sheet, marking off 30 minutes each day, and actually filling in what I did in those 30 minutes lost versus what I actually intended to do. When I start observing this over a period of time, I will realize that there’s a lot of things that I’ve uncovered about myself, which I didn’t realise before. So, the reason that I may uncover is that maybe I spend a lot of time reinforcing negative thoughts about the job, and that is why the reason I don’t enjoy my job. So, after I do this for a period of time, I end up understanding myself better. A few questions I can ask myself, did I work out the day I had a productive workday, how much caffeine did I have the day I had a productive workday, did I actually eat the right nutrition or the right meal the day I had the most productive workday, and so on and so forth.
If I take the defined problem to be a part of the holistic system, and a goal is to improve the system, the solution could go much further. For instance, let’s say I’ve identified a problem in my level of fatigue, and the solution was to ensure a nutrition balance in my body. Using my body as a system and then thinking of the solution or the remedy I decide to adopt a solution that intentionally doesn’t harm other parts of the body.
If I am not interested in the field that I am working in currently, in the ideation phase I may have identified a few possible solutions for instance, and a quick prototype could have been something like interviewing people in a new field, shadowing someone who works in the field of interest, or taking online courses to gauge my interest in the new field. If I did all of these things, I could actually avoid the hard work and the risk of actually not liking what I end up switching to, and I end up learning a lot more about myself before actually doing everything else, the happier I am and the further I can go into my prototype until I find a significant roadblock or a barrier.
I think the final step, that is not incorporated officially in any of these design phases is resilience and acceptance of failure. The only way to be innovative is by being comfortable with doing things that have not been done before and accepting the high possibility of failure.
