Climate
Filed under environment
Also driven by energy, farming, transport, and how we live.
System-thinking at BioMedima
Why the World Needs Systems Thinkers
Specialization taught us to understand the parts. Today's hardest problems live in the connections between them.
One problem, many owners
Health
Filed under medicine
Also shaped by food, housing, work, and public policy.
Poverty
Filed under economics
Also tied to schooling and public infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence
Filed under technology
Also reshaping jobs, education, security, and governance.
What is optimal for each part is not necessarily optimal for the whole.
What makes these problems hard
- ConnectedPull one lever and others move.
- NonlinearA small shock can cascade across countries.
- DynamicWhat works today may fail tomorrow.
- Side effectsWider roads bring more traffic.
- Trade-offsSome choices need values as well as engineering.
Built to perform, or built to last?
« La robustesse, c'est maintenir le système stable malgré les fluctuations, à court terme et à plus long terme. »
Robustness is keeping the system stable despite fluctuations, in the short term and the longer term.
Olivier Hamant, plant biologist at INRAE, interview for Millénaire 3 (2024). His case, made from living systems: plants are robust because they are not efficient.
| Performance asks | Robustness asks | |
|---|---|---|
| Aim | Best result in expected conditions | Keep doing the job when conditions change |
| Spare capacity | Waste to remove | Margin to keep |
| Duplicates | Cost | Backup, if it fails independently |
| Variety | Standardize | Keep several ways of doing it |
| Speed | Faster is better | Some slowness absorbs shocks |
| Horizon | This quarter | This quarter and the next decade |
System-thinkingHow the parts depend on each other.
RobustnessWhat those connections have to survive.
Collective intelligenceWho has to act on it, together.
The system that wins under ideal conditions is often not the one still doing its job when they change.
What a systems thinker does
- Sees past disciplinary and organizational boundaries
- Looks for the structure behind recurring events
- Anticipates feedback and unintended consequences
- Puts scientific knowledge next to economic and social knowledge
- Weighs competing goals openly
- Thinks across short and long time horizons
- Keeps margins for what the plan didn't expect
- Tests assumptions and changes course when a fix fails
Systems thinkers do not replace specialists. They connect what specialists know.
What has to change around them
- Education
Isolated subjectsDepth plus cross-disciplinary learning- Organizations
Functional silosShared outcomes- Leadership
Command and controlCoordinated action- Decisions
Local and short-termSystem-wide and long-term- Measurement
Departmental KPIsEnd-to-end impact- Innovation
Technology firstPeople, processes, and incentives too
Most organizations already know their problems cross departments. The harder question is who in the room can show how the pieces connect, and that is what our screening tries to find.