Chapter 1. Systems Thinking

Snapshot

Southwest Airlines is a company that has defied the odds against success in the rough world of the airline industry and become a model for others to follow—a model that has been enormously difficult to copy. Why? Because would-be imitators copy the parts of the system that fit their mental models, but they don’t copy the way these parts work together as a system. They fail to appreciate the fundamentally different way of thinking behind the Southwest Airlines system: systems thinking.

For decades, John Seddon has used systems thinking to dramatically improve service organizations. “To take a systems view is to think about the organization from the outside-in, to understand customer demand and to design a ...

Get Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.