Once again, my blog entry needs to start with excuses for not having written anything for months, this time because of the illness of at least one household member, which hasn’t really left enough time for sleep, let alone personal time during which I was alert enough to write.

That seems to be abating, so yesterday I had time to write a new section, introducing the idea of systems thinking tailored to thinking about human social systems.

I have been switching between the idea of going straight into workshops and having an introduction to some of the basic tools before that. During the forced hiatus I’ve swung back to the introduction idea. This was particularly motivated by the already large volume of work about systems thinking. Although much of it claims to have some general principles which apply to all systems, they usually seem biased to the types of systems studied by the authors prior to trying to generalize. So I expect I have done the same in this introductory attempt. I hope I think my way out of it as I discover its limitations through the workshops and your comments on Twitter.

The biggest challenges for applying other systems thinking tools to social systems is that human social systems are abstract. They often do not have boundaries and at some level, they are made up of people who also make up other human systems. We can be voters in a (partial) democracy, workers in a corporation, students in the education system and many more, with each role influencing the way we think about the others. Within a given institution, we may be playing a role as defined by the institution while also acting to change the institution with or without a mandate from the institution.

This leaves me suspecting that there are few generalisations of tools that apply across them all, but I’m hoping that at least some of the tools have value that can be transferred across more than one.

We shall see, time permitting.