- What is systems thinking? This lecture quotes a number of definitions from the field and highlights important characteristics of systems thinking.
- What is a system? Systems are everywhere around us, they are made up of the interactions of their parts. Find out more in this lecture.
Systems thinking uses a number of tools in order to undertstand how systems work. Here, the most important are introduced and more references are given.
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| - Just a glass of water. This activity introduces participants to key ideas of systems thinking through a simple experiment.
- Angry, not without reason. This activity evolves around a role play. Participants are asked to draw behavior over time graphs as well as a causal loop. Ideally, this activitiy should be used after "The vicios cycle of discrimination" and "The facilitator's walking behaviour over time".
- Why things escalate. This activity introduces systems archetypes and deals more specifically with the escalation archetypes.
- Power of the purse. This activity applies stocks and flows first to an everyday example and then to conflict.
- Applying systems thinking to conflict analysis. There is so far no comprehensively developed guide for applying systems thinking to conflict analysis. It is suggested here to go through a number of steps in order to apply systems thinking tools to conflict analysis. Systems thinking is like learning a new language, you become fluent through practicing! The following steps should be gone through for one conflict.
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