Systems Thinking and Archetypes in the Military, Postulating a New Archetype

Systems thinking involves looking beyond events to see patterns of behaviour and the underlying systemic interrelationships. This is especially important for teams of planners or decision makers that are required to have a shared understanding of the systems they are affecting. Soon after ‘systems thinking’ emerged, the creation of generic counter-intuitive structures that seem to occur repeatedly in different systems began. These generic structures (which have come to be known as Archetypes) are models that can represent systems across different domains. This paper outlines the most 9 common archetypes that were first proposed by Senge. Finally, a new archetype is proposed that is characterized by a critical event triggering a massive increase in some factor.