Systemic Thinking (known, in non-academic circles, as Pattern Thinking) is a simple technique for making sense of challenging situations and developing simple interventions for transforming them.

It has its origins in the Theory of Contraints (TOC), The Theory of Inventive Thinking (TRIZ), Systems Thinking and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), but is evident in most cognitive science and systems science arenas.

Systemic Thinking's underlying discovery is the Fractal Phenomenon: dynamically-complex adaptive systems are driven by a single repeating interaction-pattern.  This discovery was first made by Gary Bartlett & Lynne Bartlett in 2000.

Systemic Thinking enables people to deliberately and systematically gain significantly deeper insights into challenging situations and complex domains by surfacing the interaction-patterns that underly, drive and govern them.  The human brain is a pattern recognition and application engine - Systemic Thinking merely provides a simple framework and process for turbo-charging the brain's natural capability to see patterns and use them to intervene effectively systemically (at the pattern level).

Systemic (Pattern-level) Intervention enables ordinary people to deliberately and systematically improve any situation dramatically.

Click here to find out why it's so challenging to improve challenging situations...

Click here to download a late draft of a March 2013 article on Systemic Thinking written for the TOC Community.

Click here to download Systemic TOC - a chapter in "Echoes of TOC" - a collection of articles on the Theory of Constraints, one of Pattern Thinking's foundational technologies.