When systems thinking is not a natural act

Competence in systems thinking is implicitly ssumed among the population of engineers and managers - in act, most technical people will self-identify as systems hinkers. But systems thinking competencies are not as revalent as these assertions might lead one to assume. ontrolled experiments show that systems thinking erformance, even among highly educated people, is poor. This aper provides a set of systems thinking competencies and emonstrates how these are not as common as advertised. We lso discuss how these competencies can be measured. Our ain thesis is that systems thinking is not a natural act because volution has favored mechanisms tuned to dealing with mmediate surface features of problems. We discuss the mplications of this philosophy and provide recommendations or closing the gap between the demand and supply of systems hinking.

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