Quora answer: Systems Thinking: Where can I find examples of systems thinking used in the ‘real world’?

We are in this strange situation in which systems thinking is actually fairly pervasive but it is still being sold as if it were something new. Generally this is done by adding something to it and then acting like this is the real systems thinking for which the earlier versions were just a prelude. We are actually in a situation where systems thinking is now too pervasive and we are starting to call everything a system, and so not the other schemas are not getting enough attention, like form and pattern. In the seventies and eighties the cutting edge was to combine formalism, structuralism (pattern schema), and system into more complex higher level schemas. But since the system schema more or less won the battle for people’s hearts and minds now we need to pay more attention to the pattern (structural) and the form schema.

So I almost want to say, look anywhere and you will see the systems schema being used as the main way of organizing and understanding things. We now have systems engineering which is the discipline of building complex systems as in Aerospace companies that are complicated conglomerates of hardware and software. And if the hardware is given on a standard platform then we build software systems. There are many books that tell you how to do requirements engineering, architectural design. As well as implementation, verification, validation, integration and test of these complex systems. Almost all disciplines treat their subject matter in a systematic way these days. And they consider for the most part the phenomena that they take to be their subject matter as a system.