Follow the Money

Chapter 2. How Systems Thinking Can Help

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This chapter introduces some key concepts of systems thinking. Systems thinking can help you “see the wood for the trees”, and identify the principal factors in the behaviour of groups of agents. This is a particularly useful set of concepts when analyzing the behaviour of human organisations.

The Limits of Intuition

When faced with a situation where your efforts to change the status quo appear to be going nowhere, it is often helpful to take a different point of view to attack the problem. The method we use in this book is an example of systems thinking. Systems thinking is nothing new - physicists, psychoanalysts, and historians have always pondered the significant aspects of large, seemingly inchoate collections of events - but it has become more formalised in recent years, particularly in the work of Donella Meadows (author of Thinking in Systems), Stafford Beer (early advocate of the study of Cybernetics, the concept of self-regulating systems), and others.

A business is a system composed of a group of people, ...