Systems Thinking and Sociotechnical Organizations

We are almost at the end of our journey, and at this point, the attentive reader might have noticed a few patterns. The occurrences of concepts such as feedback loops, communication, independence, value, entropy, whole, and effectiveness are not a coincidence. All the subjects of this book have been viewed through the lens of Systems Thinking, hence the reason for focusing on these concepts.

Systems thinking, as "the capability to identify and understand systems, predicting their behavior and devising modifications to them in order to produce desired effects," gives an outstanding advantage, not only to understand the deep reasons behind the principles for writing good software, but also to understand the systemic problems arising in organizations. This is because Systems Thinking offers a generic set of principles applicable to every kind of system.

Note

Ross D. Arnold and Jon P. Wade, 2015 Conference on Systems...