Systems Thinking
An approach to analysis that focuses on how a system's parts interrelate and work together over time, rather than reducing them to isolated components.
Origin
Roots trace to Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian biologist who began developing General Systems Theory in the 1930s as an alternative to reductionism. Jay Forrester at MIT founded System Dynamics in the 1950s, applying computational modeling to complex systems. The phrase entered mainstream management vocabulary through Peter Senge's 1990 book The Fifth Discipline, which called systems thinking the essential discipline for learning organizations.
Everyday Use
When you notice that fixing traffic congestion in one neighborhood just pushes it into the next, you're bumping into systems thinking. It's the lens that reveals why a hospital can't fix wait times by only hiring more doctors — if the bottleneck is in discharge paperwork, more doctors just shifts the queue. Any time you zoom out from a single part to ask "how does this connect to everything else?", you're thinking in systems.