What systems thinking books would you recommend?

🙋 Questions
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1

While watching Episode Nine: Exploring Systems Thinking, many books were mentioned.

This is a space to capture those recommendations and to add your own! What book would you recommend?

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There were so many good titles mentioned, here are some:

“Human Factors Methods for Design: Making Systems Human Centred” by C P Nemeth: Human Factors Methods for Design by Christopher P. Nemeth | Goodreads

“Soft Systems” by Checkland and Poulter in “Systems Approaches to Making Change: A Practical Guide” (2020): https://www.awesomebooks.com/book/9781447174714/systems-approaches-to-making-change-a-practical-guide/used

Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking - Jerry Weinberg

Learning Systems Thinking - Diana Montalion

The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off - Erik Hollnagel

Some books that are about disrupting thought patterns which help with breaking vicious circles:

  • E de Bono “Six Thinking Hats”
  • M Bonifer & J Shternshns “Ctrl Shift”
  • T Katan “Creative Trespassing”
  • L Hyde “Trickster Makes This World”
  • C Duhigg “Power of Habit”
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3

If I only changed the Software, why is the phone on fire?: Embedded Debugging methods Revealed

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Great idea to start this topic, @jmosley5.

We could eventually add recommendations on this post to the Software Testing Books wiki

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The Systems Bible by John Gall is a kinda funny
Freakonomics A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

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The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization: First edition (Century business)

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The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization: First edition

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The Programmer’s Brain : What every programmer needs to know about cognition - Felienne Hermans

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The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

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The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt, Jeff Cox

As mentioned by @curiousduck

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This is Strategy by Seth Godin.

Some notes from the book.

  1. Systems deliver value. Coordinated human effort creates productivity and value. People are rarely rational so systems adjudicate disagreements even if we’re not in sync, we can move forward. Consistency allows slack. Power and leverage of systems can cause undesirable effects.
  1. The building or the roads? Systems have nodes (buildings) and connections (roads). Connections tend to stay longer than nodes.
  1. The unseen assistant (and the mysterious vandal). Working with a system = always makes your work better. Working against a system = harming.
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As for me, this topic is new and I’m still exploring, and so far I haven’t found any book that is focused on system thinking, however, I recently found this website that has content related to system thinking particularly :

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I would recommend The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. I found it very useful and wrote this: I am learning about systems thinking to help me test

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The Systems Thinker’ and ‘Tools Of Systems Thinkers’ by Albert Rutherford.

Another recommendation I came across whilst doing Testing Trends writing.

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I created a handy list of Systems Thinking books on the MoTaverse.

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