Saturday, October 17, 2009

Work the System

Sam Carpenter has written a wonderful book about how viewing the world from a system perspective can be a mindset change with far reaching impacts.



Simply thinking about the myriad systems in everyday life tends to create a focus on cause and effect that can be very constructive. Recognizing that many different systems are at work that most of the time work flawlessly despite their complexity encourages optimism. When glitches do happen it is important to understand that most of the system is probably still working correctly and what is needed is to determine how the subsystem that has failed can be fixed. I like to think of this as the engineer's mindset, which is very beneficial to problem solving.



Sam has very generously made his book available for free as either an ebook or audio podcast on his web site.

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