Systems Thinking by Stealth – How to ‘Wash the Great Unwashed’!

摘要

Is the systems approach as widely used as one might expect?This paper argues that it isn’t. This is not because the approach is flawed or weak.Rather, it is because any hint of portrayal of the systems approach as ‘the method tohelp you change your mental models’ is likely to be perceived by successful managersmore as a threat than a benefit - many people are happy their mental models, and justdon’t want them changed.How can this resistance be overcome?This paper makes a suggestion based on the insight that, before you can adopt a newmental model, you have to discard the old one; before you can learn something new,you must unlearn something old. And in general, unlearning the old is much harderthan learning the new. Perhaps we should therefore talk not of the ‘learningorganisation’, but of the ‘unlearning organisation’.