# The Value of Systems Thinking By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-09-06 One of the quickest ways to improve one's analytics capability is to learn about systems thinking. This methodology focuses on aggregating outcomes as products of systems. The act of asking what system could generate such an outcome is valuable. It challenges one to think beyond the outcome and ask more profound and "causal" questions. This increases understanding of the system and how one might predict system-level behavior and outcomes. For example, understanding how a car systematically works is much more effective in predicting failures than collecting a ton of data about observed car failures and trying to deduce failure probability distributions. As one progresses further down the study of systems thinking, one will discover that there are only a handful of ways that systems behave. For example, systems with positive and negative feedback loops behave in particular ways. The challenge is how effectively one can identify these behavioral patterns. This takes some time, but with practice, one will become proficient at identifying these patterns with little effort. Mastering the observation of these patterns and why they happen will look like magic to an uninformed audience. #### Related Items [[Systems Thinking]] [[Analytics]] [[Understanding]] [[Methodology]] [[Data]] [[Thinking]]