Recommended (with reservations)
A book pitched at IT people with ‘systems’ in the title must be about architecture and/or design, right? I was quite wrong about this one. The title is honest in its description of the content: it is a collection of tools and great for introducing these. Half of them are soft-skill tools and one can apply these tools to any interpersonal relation. The introduction to logical fallacies is of great help. The descriptions of the disorders that are undermining teams and companies are accurate. Left unanswered is what to do when facing passive-aggressive or worse attitudes from individuals, teams or organizations – I do not think box breathing will help here. The other half of the tools are technical but general in nature and can be applied to anything that has to be analyzed. But before being able to use these tools, you will have to read the books on these methodologies as this one is too low on application details. The whole tools collection is organized around an ‘Iceberg Model’ which, sadly, is no substitute for a strategy to tackle systems design or analysis; instead we are repeatedly told that “We cannot control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them”.
One can only hope the system is not a critical infrastructure one. I contend this is the point where the usefulness of the book stops for the typical engineer or architect. The ‘dance’ is applied to a fictitious MAGO company/project and results in a bunch of meta-artifacts. If you are high in the Powerpoint-people hierarchy, these might be of use but for an engineer, I fail to see the value. While the glossary is offering run-of-the-mill definitions for system, conceptual integrity and non/linear thinking, the book strays into something else. The notion of ‘system’ is as vogue as to be ‘sociotechnical’. Fred Brooks’ conceptual integrity is accordingly stretched to accommodate the “systems that are in flux” and thus is not static either. After finishing the book, I am left unclear what is non-linear thinking, analytical thinking being linear (and reductionist) by author’s statement. In the end, I am left with the impression that the author has not come yet to terms with the entropy introduced with the latest vague of Cloud changes in the IT ecosystem.
Website: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-systems-thinking/9781098151324/
