Lecture A2 (2023-01-12): "Introduction to Systems Thinking" by Kim (1999)

In this lecture, we review "Introduction to Systems Thinking" by Kim (1999), which defines a "system" and motivates the "feedback-loop worldview" (in contrast with an "event-oriented worldview"). We start by contrasting "systems" and simple "collections." We then move on to talking about events, patterns, and systemic structures, and how finding systemic structures (which are cryptic although events are observable) can lead to finding "leverage points" that allow for choosing small actions that have big changes in system behavior. We start to introduce causal loop diagrams (CLD's) and behavior over time (BOT) graphs (BOTG). We will continue our discussion of CLD's in the next lecture.