Systems Thinking
Creativity is:
- Thinking in a different way from others
- Imaginative
- Original ideas
Creativity happens:
- Spontaneously, hard to force
- Asking yourself questions
- Changing your environment
What is flight to a bird?
- Innate
- Survival
- Evolved capacity
8 Tenets of Systems Thinking:
- Holism
- Explanation- a system that is viewed as it own entity; as a sum of its parts; looking at the pyramid from the top down/seeing the big picture
- Example- The Philippines group needs manufacturers, designers, and legal workers who all can come together to create the opportunity to make a profit off of recycling plastics. None of them could ever do it on their own.
- Differentiation
- Explanation- Identifying individual components of a large system
- Example- Malnutrition team breaking up and assigning roles after week 1 in SL
- Interdependence
- Explanation- All systems depend on other systems or subsystems to successfully meet their responsibilities
- Example- Malnutrition tried to partner with community leaders such as Reverend David because of many people’s interdependence on him and the church
- Multifinality
- Explanation- Multiple unique outcomes resulting from a single initial product/system
- Example- All GSIF projects doing different things while all at World Hope International in Sierra Leone
- Equifinality
- Explanation- Understanding that a goal can be achieved in a variety of ways and paths
- Example- A lot of groups in GSIF are addressing maternal health in a variety of ways.
- Regulation
- Explanation- Feedback mechanism for accountability, alerting failures and successes
- Example- Ebola checking in with translators to make sure our interviewing questions are being conveyed and received correctly.
- Abstraction
- Explanation- looking at broad ideas instead of focusing on specific details
- Example- The Ebola project does this by trying to look at the overall pictures of humans and overall picture of bats looking to see overlap.
- Leverage Points
- Explanation- Areas where small changes create a large overall effect
- Example- Recipe for malnutrition changing certain ingredients can have significant effects on overall nutrition values
Emergence:
- Definition in simple words
- when an entity has qualities as a whole that its individual parts do not possess separately
- Example of emergent system that creates (or has created) sustainable and scalable social value
- The Phillapines group is producing an emergent system by combining pieces to recycle and turning plastic into a meaningful product which create tangible value in the form of new goods as well as employ many women. This system is emergent and would not function without each of its parts
Multifinal solution to Water Hyacinth Problem:
- Pay local waterside people of the community a small stipend for access to their areas
- Other community members can be hired to collect and process the hyacinth, income generating solution for the community
- Previous workers of hers now in charge of transportation/distribution for her.