The Systems Thinker's Toolbox
Joseph Kasser · CRC Press, 2018
published v1.0.0knowledge reading · systems · 2 min read
Joe mentors me in systems thinking. The term "knowledge reading", and the way I write these pages, comes from him.
- Look at a problem from several defined perspectives before choosing a solution.
- Most bad solutions come from looking from one perspective only.
- The perspectives are a checklist, so nothing important is left to chance.
The idea
Kasser's Holistic Thinking Perspectives give you nine places to stand when you look at a problem. Most people stand in one or two. The perspectives turn "think holistically" into something you can actually do, and check that you did.
The perspectives, applied
Here they are applied to a problem from this site: making sure a pipeline runs the image it was meant to run.
| Perspective | The question it made me ask |
|---|---|
| Big picture | Where does this pipeline sit in the whole supply chain? |
| Operational | What does a developer actually do, step by step, when they name an image? |
| Functional | What must the system do: resolve, verify, run? |
| Structural | Which parts do that: registry, signer, verifier, runner? |
| Generic | What is this like? Package signing has solved a version of it before. |
| Continuum | What lies between "no checks" and "everything signed"? |
| Temporal | How did tags come to be trusted, and what changes next? |
| Quantitative | What share of images run today are verified? (See Gilb.) |
| Scientific | What's my hypothesis, and what experiment would test it? |
My application, not the book's example.
How I use it
Before a write-up, I walk the perspectives and keep the questions that change the answer. The Scientific perspective is why my experiments state a hypothesis first. The Quantitative one is where Kasser meets Gilb: once you've looked from every side, you still have to put a number on what "better" means.
Where it connects
- Gilb, Competitive Engineering The Quantitative perspective, made into a requirement language.
- Malotaux, Evo and TaskCycle The Temporal perspective, run every week.
- Wirth, Systematic Programming The Structural perspective, as stepwise refinement. (draft)
- Minto, The Pyramid Principle How to present what the perspectives found. (draft)
References
- J. E. Kasser, The Systems Thinker's Toolbox: Tools for Managing Complexity. Boca Raton, FL, USA: CRC Press, 2018.
- J. E. Kasser, Holistic Thinking: Creating Innovative Solutions to Complex Problems. [Publisher, 2013: verify].
Ire o? (Blessings (good fortune to you), Yoruba),
Olarotimi
Revisions
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