Thank you Kate for all of your effort to make this happen and to get us here. We are very happy to be here with everybody that we can't see, but we know you're out there. Um so we're happy to join you this morning. Today we're going to be talking about what Derek and I think is sort of the most important skill of all skills, which is thinking or systems thinking. We've studied it for a long time. If I Tell you how many years, it'll age us, so it's been a lot of years. Um I think
the bottom line up front for for the audience is that systems thinking isn't a skill that's fixed, right? It's something that you can improve. There are specific things that you can do and practice that will dramatically improve the degree to which you are a systems thinker. And the only part of that that you have to worry about is becoming Aware of those things and practicing them because it's the practice of them that is the fastest and surest way for you to become a systems thinker and to improve your personal and uh professional lives with you
know, individually and then with your teams. And just as a side note, and we'll get to this later, these are skills that can't be replaced by AI, so they're very important for all of us to learn. So, let's get started. I think what I Want to start with is reminding ourselves that all of the work that we're doing right now as systems thinkers, academics, practitioners, in my opinion and Derek's opinion, I'm going to speak for you Derek for a second here. It's more critical now than ever, right? We we all know we're living in times
of great acute uncertainty, financial, political, environmental. Many of the challenges that we're all facing are deeply Interconnected. So, we don't think of them as just operational challenges anymore. They are in fact complex systems problems. And complex problems require systems thinking. They require adaptive leadership and they require us to create really resilient structures and systems out in the world. So, today's leaders, all of you, all of us, we have to be more than just managers. We need to be visionaries and we need to invest in our capacity to Think and to adapt to the reality of
the situations we're dealing with. Um and this is why leadership that's rooted in systems thinking, in my opinion, is no longer optional. It's absolutely necessary. And contrary to popular belief uh and some misperceptions, it's actually quite simple. So, I want to start with your context, which is the reason we're all here today at INCOSE. My understanding is that INCOSE's vision is to unite and advance the global systems community. I read that. It's definitely more than just a slogan. Um from my perspective, from a systems perspective, your vision is essentially about fostering engineering knowledge, uh exchange
of of knowledge, application of that knowledge in in SE to all kinds of context, not to mention education and furthering research in that area. You also are, from what I can tell, one of the world's trusted authorities in the practice, science, and application of systems engineering to many different contexts. And when I think about INCOSE generally, it seems that you're really working to scale human capability through systems thinking concepts, tools, and practice. To me and to Derek, I know I can speak for you there, that's a good goal. Um so you have uh 27,000 members
Worldwide, which means that you are one of the more impactful organizations in this field. And at this scale, for your members, the people in your organization to be good employees, good family members, good managers, good leaders, I think we all know that we need to be systems thinkers because only systems thinking is going to equip us to navigate the complexity we face, align our align our priorities, build shared mental models, which is Incredibly important, and shape the future that we're all hoping to bring about. So, what we've seen in systems engineering is is that systemic
tools, techniques, and training, when placed in the hands of a bivalent linear non-systemic thinker, merely transform them into bivalent linear non-systemic tools, right? And that that's really uh to me the big takeaway in systems Engineering is uh we and we've seen this in many departments across the world that you you've got to change the way the engineer is thinking along with giving them all the systems tools and stuff, or they'll just be a non-systems thinker using systems tools. And there are many excellent systems tools, techniques, and training, but if you don't focus on the fundamentals
of what makes a systems thinker and train Our people to be systemic in their thinking, then all the tools and technologies in the world will not solve the problems we face. Now, our vision across the lab and the podcast and everything is a world where every human is equipped to be to think systemically, not just an ideal, a standard we can measure, train, and scale globally, and one that's based on science. Just like LEED change changed the the building industry, this aims to transform how people think. And it's the benchmark for cognitive capacity and complexity
and adaptivity. And it's again built on science and grounded in practice. Um so this is not for us just a movement, it's a measurable standard we can all strive for to help us adapt and thrive in today's changing world. And that's as Important to so many different disciplines, but certainly to systems engineering. Um and it's not just us saying this. According to the World Economic Forum, systems thinking is a top 10 job skill. Forbes calls it the most crucial leadership skill of today. And um Autodesk talked about it being that total systems thinking is your
ultimate shield against AI takeover. So, it's not A trend, it's something more like a wake-up call. Um we research and teach uh two things at Cornell University, systems thinking, what it is, why we need it to to be systems thinkers, and how to get better at it. That that's something we've really spent a lot of time on in our research is how do you actually improve the skill and how do we how can we measure whether that skill is Improved. And we also teach about systems thinking at the individual level that it rolls up into
systems thinking at the organizational level. And so we call that systems leadership and it's very related uh and many of the same skills are involved. So, today we'll give you a kind of a crash course in in the last 30 years of research about um systems thinking itself. And uh in particular, we'll be asking a few questions. Why systems thinking? What is systems thinking? How do you do systems thinking? That's the one that to me is the the most uh interesting. We spent the first decade or so with the first two, but how do you
actually do it? Can we measure it? Can you get better at it? And importantly, what has the last 30 or 35 years of science taught us about it? What systems thinking really is. I'll give you a hint, it's DSRP. Practice is more important than the concept Learning, meaning you can learn a bunch of concepts, but more important than that, the research shows that practicing some simple things is actually leads to more skill. And what precisely to practice. We we've literally discovered what specifically people need to practice in order to develop the skill um at getting
good at systems thinking. And also, once you know what to practice, It's important to know how to practice. There's certain things that get you better faster and other things that, you know, sound like they will work, but they but they don't. So, this brings us to the heart of it all, building systems thinkers. How to become a systems thinker who thinks in more complex and robust ways to better align with the reality and the situations that we face. And we asked ourselves a fundamental Question, how can systems thinking be made teachable to anyone? What does
someone actually need to do systems thinking and to become a systems thinker? So, we went to work and again drawing on this uh vast number of years, like Laura said, we don't want to date ourselves, but a lot of years, we took everything we'd learned and distilled it into a set of simple, repeatable moves. And these aren't lofty concepts or Academic speak jargon. They're practical habits of mind that anyone can use to think more clearly, solve any problem, and adapt with confidence in an uncertain world. And and these are things that we use with the
highest levels of special forces, engineers, scientists, CEOs, and we also, believe it or not, teach these same skills to kindergarteners and third graders and eighth graders. So, one of the things that I want to Clear up a little bit is if you if you consult Google, um you're going to hear about probably something on the order of about 38 different types of thinking, right? There's lots of different types of thinking out there that are talked about, but your brain doesn't know it. And thinking isn't what you think it is. Thinking is uh an algorithm, a
pattern, a processing information, and making Meaning out of information. So, we we organize information to make meaning out of it, or what sometimes is called mental models. And how do you do that? You to understand thinking more deeply, to become more fast and accurate at it, the answer is by understanding that there are four simple rules into how we think about things and how we build meaning or mental models. We take information and we organize it, and we do all this all the time. And we call those four simple rules DSRP cuz I named it
after the the rules themselves. So, that's distinction, systems, relationships, and perspectives. And it really is fundamentally how we organize information to make meaning. So, we distinguish between one thing and another, or identity and other. We sort things into part-whole groupings, and we're we are we can do Lots of different part-whole groupings. Uh we see relationships between and among things, how they act upon and react to each other. So, action-reaction. And finally, we take perspectives, and we're doing all these four things all the time. We take perspectives that that form you know, a point, the looker,
and a view, the looked at. So, DSRP is an empirically tested Cognitive processing theory, and it is at the base of all of those 38 types of thinking. So, you might say that if you learn DSRP, you kind of get all those other 38 types of thinking for free. Um we also know from the research, a summary of the of the metacognitive research, this idea, which is that insights into our own thoughts, or metacognition, is key to high achievement in all domains. This is very Important research, um and it's showing us that it's true that
people how to think about their thinking, meaning getting them more aware of their own thinking, can change really everything in any domain. So, I want to share with you just one of the research studies that we've done. There's many of them, but I want to share this one with you because I think it really captures some of what's going On. We conducted a large study with over 34,000 participants um to better understand how people actually think. That is, what patterns of mind they tend to use when reflecting on a topic, uh an issue, a problem.
So, participants were asked to map their thinking on a given issue. When we then analyze those maps to assess the degree To which they demonstrated the core underlying skills of systems thinking, specifically the patterns. And this allowed us to move beyond theory and observe how people naturally or don't naturally apply these cognitive moves in real-world thinking tasks. Um and it also allowed us to discover a power law or a Pareto law. Let's put these results into a scenario that's easy to relate to. So, imagine you're leading a team of 10 people, And you ask yourself,
as we talk through this data, ask yourself if if this data matches what you've seen in the real world in your real-world experience. Does this kind of relate to how you've experienced teams? So, as we walk through these findings, think about your own team, your colleagues, your students, your staff, and how they tend to think through problems. When we asked people to think something through, here's what happened. Five out of 10 people freeze up. They basically get uh you know, they get stumped. So, they get stuck. They don't know where to start, and they mostly
do very little or nothing. The other five start thinking, but only at a surface level. They make a few Identity distinctions. You can think of this as like putting up a few post-it notes on the board. They can name a couple of relevant ideas or elements, but they don't go much further. So, that's five out of 10 people across this sample. Uh two and a half people out of 10 make a little more progress. They begin to simply take some of those things that they put on the board and Break them down into parts. Right?
But they don't go much deeper. And none of the 10, zero out of 10 people, zoom out and go up. They they two and a half go down, but zero out of 10 zoom out. Two and a half zoom in. Now, this is a shocking statistic that one and a half people out of 10 of your team go further to identify any relationships whatsoever between ideas Or things that they're thinking about. Or can even name those relationships that they have. So, that's one and a half people on the team of 10 think about relationships, which
we know is critical to understanding systems. And also shockingly, less than one person takes a perspective other than their own, a different perspective on the issue. And only about a quarter of a person out of 10, statistically, actually names or distinguishes the Perspective they're using, meaning a quarter out of 10 uh actually is aware that they're taking a perspective. So, out of 10 people, only a tiny fraction naturally engage in deeper, more powerful patterns of thought that lead to insight, innovation, and clarity. And this pattern held true in our study across 34,000 people, and it
reflects what many of us see in our Teams. Lots of potential, but a clear gap in the skills that drive deeper, more powerful thinking. And the bottom line is that most people don't lack intelligence. They lack structure of their thinking. That's the gap that DSRP awareness will fill. And that's the power law. It's not just a theory, it's a trainable set of cognitive moves that anyone can Learn, and when you do, the impact on individual and team performance is pretty transformative, and the and the research shows that. We now know which specific skills people need
to practice to get better at systems thinking. In other words, this research reveals that when people think through an issue, they consistently do some things. And and this is the important part, they fail to do other really critical Things. Like, they zoom in, but they don't zoom out. They see some of them see relationships, but most of them don't. If we do more of the right kinds of mental moves, we can become better systems thinkers, leading to better decisions, better behavior, more accurate predictions, and thinking that's better aligned with the reality of the situations we
face and the things that we design and engineer. So, here's what we found. People make distinctions, but rarely question the validity or consider what's being left out. They often organize things into part-whole systems, but they seldom, if ever, examine those systems across different levels of scale. When it comes to relationships, we only occasionally see them. And even then, we rarely name them or explore them as material objects. And most of the time, we view issues only from our own perspective, failing to seek out multiple perspectives to better understand things. By understanding these common thinking skills,
and and this is the important part, the gaps in our thinking, there is now, based on this research and many other research the the ecology of research, a clear path for how to improve systems Thinking in practice. Not just talk about it, but improve the skill. It's now about working It's not really about like being more intelligent or working harder, it's just about learning how we think and practicing more. And it's a lot like learning the fundamentals of the game, whether it's basketball or whatever sport or activity that you're in, or hobby. You don't just
read about shooting, Dribbling, and passing. You get to the gym, and you practice the moves. And the more you practice, the better you get at it. Systems thinking is the same, but we haven't caught on to that. We haven't caught on that it's the same. It's a trainable set of cognitive moves that anyone can learn. And as you learn each move, you start to combine them, just like shooting, dribbling, and Passing. So, just like mastering the basics transforms a team's performance on the court, learning these mental moves that we're going to show you transforms how
individuals and teams can think about things systemically. How they solve problems and how they work together in the real world to design better systems. And Don't just take my word for it. Our latest research confirms that these moves, when practiced, have pretty pretty large effects. We gave a real-world problem to 1,200 everyday people across the US and then we showed them a short video and we broke them up so one each each person only saw one video. Less than 1 minute these videos were. And it taught just one of the skills That I just showed
you or talked about. And the moves. So it taught them is is not move, zoom in, zoom out, part party, RDS, barbell, and perspective circle. Those are the names of the moves. And after just 1 minute of targeted training, their critical thinking and problem-solving and even emotional intelligence skills, believe it or not, jumped by 250 To 550%. So the takeaway is that with these moves, better thinking isn't just possible, it's trainable. So let's go through a quick overview of what these moves are and this isn't intended to get you to, you know, get make understand
it at the at the high level, but it'll give you a a quick overview. So just like a push-up trains the body, mental moves Train your mind. And like any skill, better thinking doesn't happen all at once, it happens in reps. Small, consistent practice day after day, better every day. That's how we build mental fitness and that's how you become a systems thinker. So because systems thinking isn't just something you learn, it's something you get better at by doing through practice, practice, practice. Um Laura is going to show you the six moves that you need
to practice. Now, you're going to understand them conceptually in a very short period of time, but practicing them is the key. All right, so we're going to give you a quick overview of these moves and, you know, we've really seen in practice and our research and then in practice with other groups after the fact that these moves, if they're practiced and used, Really do help you solve really complex challenges, whether it's individually or at work in teams. Um It might be hard to believe on its surface, but when you start to see them, you'll you'll
see that they have some profound effect. So practicing these moves will help you really be able to navigate any issue, concept, and increase your level of systems thinking. So the first one is around distinctions, right? Derek said we distinguish between One thing and another thing. And the move associated with that is the is is not move. And we start by making distinctions by simply asking the question, what is X and, importantly, what is not X, right? And this move helps us set clear boundaries and those boundaries will lead to a deeper, more precise, and actual
understanding of the things we're thinking about. Because if you can't define what something is and what it isn't, you Can't obviously think clearly about it or act upon it. And here's the problem, though. Organizations, groups, and teams will often jump into initiatives, projects, or work and invest time, energy, and money into them without first building a shared mental model of what they're even talking about in the first place. And that's where we lead to misalignment, waste of resources, um missing the Outcomes you want, and that happens even before the work begins. So even though this
seems like a very simple move on its surface, it's imp- incredibly important for any type of work. And I'm going to give you a good example of this move in practice. So this is Maggie. Uh Maggie's a dog. She's also a goalie. She's a really good one and I want you to pay attention to what Maggie's doing as she's looking at all these objects. What she's doing is Making distinctions. She has good speed and instinct, but at the core, she's distinguishing everything that is and is not that black puck. And there she got it. Cuz
she was making that distinction, what is and what is not the black puck. She was laser-focused on what mattered. And it's those distinctions, making those distinctions, that are guiding her behavior in that moment, minute to minute. The same is true for us, right? The Quality of the distinctions we make, what something is and isn't, will shape our decisions, our actions, and our outcomes every day. Um at work, in our personal lives, and in leadership. So Maggie's not just a good goalie, it turns out she's a pretty good systems thinker, too. And she's super cute. All
right. So here's a little bit more practical example. Let's just talk about systems Engineering. What is and is not systems engineering? Well, this kind of distinction making might seem very simple, but it's very powerful. It helps us build a shared mental model so that when every person says the words systems engineering, we're not each assuming something different, right? We're aligned and that alignment in our distinctions is everything. It reduces confusion, it sharpens our strategy, it'll improve Collaboration across teams, departments, stakeholders, whatever it is. And in systems thinking, is is not is a foundational move because
it's those clear distinctions that lead to clear thinking, right? And so I think we should challenge ourselves for those things that we assume we all think the same thing about, let's test that a little bit because I would I would hazard a guess if you walked around the hallways of anybody's office And you asked them, "What is this and what is not this?" you would get very different answers. That's why we want to focus on that move. And this move, um even though it's really simple, the power of making clear distinctions actually can't be overstated,
right? This had a 551% increase in higher-order thinking, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving. So sometimes it's just That tiny little shift in how we frame things that can make the biggest difference. So is is not is small but powerful, I would say. All right, so the next one deals with systems, right? And, you know, we sort things into part-whole systems. But what we want to do is we want to really um ask ourselves, you know, if I'm looking at X, what do I see when I zoom into the parts of X, when I look at The
parts of X? And then, as Derek was saying in that research, we want to go even further across a higher level of scale and ask ourselves, what do I see when I zoom out to see the whole that X is a part of? And it's looking at things across different levels of scale that will help us develop deeper, more operational understanding of the things that we're working with. And remember, most of us are really good at breaking things down into parts, but The problem is if we don't go back up a level, we're missing the
broader context or the larger systems that those things belong to. So when we overlook the whole, what happens is our efforts become fragmented, they fall flat, we don't get the outcomes we want. So it's the connection between parts and wholes at different levels of scale that really gives you power in your thinking in a more systemic way of thinking about Things. And here's another fun video. I like the videos, I think they're fun, to illustrate this idea. So this is a Lowe's commercial. I don't own any stock in Lowe's. I mean, maybe I wish I
did, but I don't own stock in Lowe's. And what you see is when someone is walking through the world, we want you to be seeing things like this like this uh commercial. Now, they didn't blow up the Fish, which I really appreciated. We want you to be able to break things down into parts, see the parts of the parts, the parts of the parts across levels of scale. Um so they're constantly zooming in and zooming out in this commercial, expanding and contracting their view. So they're seeing the details and the big picture. And what we
want to do is cognitively be doing the same thing where we're being able to be have that facility across Levels of scale. So you see, they're going to blow this whole house up into its parts and then they're going to push it all back together into a whole house. We want to be able to do that cognitively. And that's what zoom in and zoom out does for us. It gets us thinking across levels of scale. And that's easy to understand conceptually, but getting your brain to practice it is the key and and have it be
your default. True story. So then if you think about just a a simple example, if you look at something like organizational change, it's easy to break down that change into its parts, new tools, expectations, scope, all kinds of things. But the the thing that you need to note here is if we stop there, only at seeing the parts, we're going to miss something crucial, which is if we really want to effectively implement organizational change, we need To zoom out and ask, "What is this effort a part of? What is a What's the larger piece of
the of the puzzle there at the up upper level?" Because it's the broader context of this change, up and down, where our insights are going to live. And it's going to help us understand how our actions are going to fit into the bigger picture, right? So we're not solving one problem while accidentally creating another and it keeps us working in si- From working in silos and at cross-purposes. So, you know, we want to make sure that what we build locally is working across those levels of scale systemically. And this move actually, um for participants who
had this move, learn this move, they had uh 266% increase in problem-solving higher-order thinking. Um which which means that being able to see systems across levels of scale will improve how you understand and also try To solve real-world problems. Now, I don't want you to think 266 is small because it's sitting next to 551, right? But 266 is a big number in and of itself. And the reason that I think, if you remember the research that Derek highlighted, we're already pretty good at at zooming in. We are we have So, we have less to gain
in the systems area. We're already pretty good at that. So, but 266 is still good. Okay, so while we're talking about Systems, there's more. When we break things into parts, we need to also be extending our thinking to ask if there are relationships among parts. And that's the next move. It's called the part party move because Derek, do you want to say it? Parts like to party. Parts like to party, right? So, we we can deepen our understanding of part-whole systems by asking um are these parts related to one Another? So, make no mistake, we're
really good at listing out parts of things. And we're really great at breaking things down. But we're not really great at seeing the connections between and among those parts. And the problem is the connections between and among those parts exist in reality whether we notice them or not. So, when we miss those relationships, it's not just an incomplete picture. Um it has real Downstream consequences for what we're working on and what we're doing, you know? If we ignore the relationships, it's going to weaken our understanding and limit our ability to really solve complex problems effectively.
So, if you look at part party, um and we ask, are there relationships between and among the parts? These are the parts of organizational change. Just notice that it's not enough to only identify the Parts. We have to understand how they interact, what influences what, and where the key dynamics and pressure points are inside of this system. And these relationships are going to determine whether we succeed or fail or whether or not we have unintended consequences in our efforts. So, seeing the connections between and among the parts is just as important as seeing the parts
themselves. And in fact, they are parts. That's right. But that's a little advanced. >> [laughter] >> So, this one had a 247% increase just by asking the one question, are these things related? That can really sharpen your thinking and lead to me more systemic. Oh, yeah, we have this video. So, this is an illustration of the concept of part party. Do you have audio? I believe so. All right, it'll come in a second. This is from a grant project called Think Water. >> tell you one last story. It's the story of the Carnation Evaporated Milk.
There's a factory in Modesto, California, right in the heart of the Central Valley. It is the only Carnation Evaporated Milk Factory in North America. This is how the factory works. They make 2 million cans of milk a day. I want to tell you one last story. They take in 120,000 gallons of raw milk and they throw it away. Here's the complicated process for making evaporated milk. They evaporate half the water out and they throw it in the sewer. That's it. That's the process. They call the evaporated water milk water. They also buy 88 million or
have been buying 88 million gallons of water a year, 250,000 gallons of fresh water a Day to run the factory. So, in one part of the factory, they're evaporating 200,000 gallons of water a day, the milk water, and throwing it in the sewer. They were supposed to throw it in the sewer. In the other part of the factory, they were paying to buy 250,000 gallons of water a day to run the factory. They were also paying to throw it in the sewer. In the middle of the drought, they talked about these. Who was the chief
engineer at the Carnation factory Said, "What in the world are we doing here?" That Carnation plant has now, if it hasn't become a zero water factory at this moment, it will in the next few months. They are going to use the water that they have been evaporating off the milk and throwing away to run the factory. Why not? By the way, it's called milk water. It's actually pretty clean. No one it flashes up off the milk, right? It's evaporated. They Are going to cut themselves off from the big pipe. In some places, that would be
a financial disaster for the water utility. In Modesto, in the middle of the drought, the city and the community could not have been happier about this initiative. By the way, the people who work in that factory, they live in that town. They're not somewhere else. So, that to me is Obviously a brilliant example of smart water. It didn't require any It required was drawing the circle a little bigger. So, that that is a great example. That's from our uh Think Water project, which was funded by USDA, of just asking the question, are these things related?
And exploring and making that one relationship that they had missed. That's the power of the move. So, then we're going to talk about relationships. Nature is full of relationships. They're everywhere. And as Derek highlighted in the research, we really, really are not very good at seeing them. But they exist, and that's the problem. So, when we do spot relationships, one of the problems is we try to force them into these clean, linear cause and effect chains like A causes B, end of story. But systems thinkers know that it's not really that simple. Systems thinkers look
for webs of causality Where outcomes are the result of loops and delays and interactions inside of systems. And they also understand that cause and effect aren't neighbors on a timeline. And when we fail to see that, that's how we end up with unintended consequences, policies that backfire, fixing things and making them worse, or solutions that create more problems. So, the move that we're going to think about with relationships is called RDS barbell. We're going to go to the next Slide. And RDS barbell is a very powerful move. It's uh related to asking not the question,
are things related, but how is X related to Y? And the simple question helps us name the relationship between things, which makes that invisible relationship visible. And it doesn't stop there, right? Once you name the relationship, then you can zoom into it and break it down into its Parts and really understand how it works. And that's what we call RDS barbell. And the good news is it's one of the easiest and most powerful things you can do immediately to start sharpening your thinking and become more systemic in how you're thinking about things. Let me give
you an example in terms of silos, right? So, we work with a lot of organizations, different types of Organizations, corporations, nonprofits. Um across the board, across all of those organizations, one issue that consistently comes up is silos, right? And as this image shows, departments will often operate in isolation. So, they function independently even when their work requires deep collaboration or integration. So, then they they ask, how do we fix silos? And Derek and I always say, RDS barbell. Right? So, you want to move from these sort of disconnected parts into more integration. And the answer
is you really focus in on the relationship between those two things. So, we start by just positing that there's a relationship between these two things shown by the line. And then we will do the next thing, which is name the relationship and claim responsibility for it. You can go to the next slide, Derek. So, too often what happens is everyone assumes that someone else is managing that connection between the two parts, in this case the two departments. But the truth is those relationships will not manage themselves. Somebody has to own them. Somebody has to tend
to them and make sure that they're functioning. So, when we name a relationship and take responsibility for it, that's when we start to move from Silos to intentional systems or intentional system design. And this is how collaboration becomes purposeful and intentional, not just sort of accidental. The next slide. So, once we've named the relationship, the next step is to see that relationship as a system with parts. So, for example, if you're looking at the relationship between Oh, I've got a typo on my slide that drives me crazy. That's supposed to be advocacy and Policy. See?
That's good. That's how you know it's live. >> [laughter] >> Um what you see is the relationship between advocacy and policy would be legislative affairs. And that itself has parts, right? Tracking legislation, building relationships, developing and implementing strategies. So, by breaking the relationship down in this way, what you're moving from is this sort of vague Collaboration to a clear structure that ensures responsibility for that relationship. And that's when systems thinking can really start bringing about organizational change. So, if you look at RDS barbell, the people who saw that move and learned that move had a
huge increase of 580 508% in problem-solving skills. Um which is just, you know, another another simple question, how are these things Related? That changes and has a big shift in their thinking and a big difference. All right, so let's look at perspectives. So, in perspectives, we're going to look at one thing from the view of another thing. So, we go and we ask ourselves, from whose point of view should I look at these things? You see, in this slide, X is the view and the three points are looking at that um at that view. So,
we ask ourselves, which point of view should we look at this thing we're thinking about? Now, this is a perspective circle and it's a universal structure. It takes one view, the thing in the center, uh and it could be an issue, an object, an idea, anything. And in this in this illustration we have six different points looking at that view. Now, it could be one point, it could be 10 points, it could be three points. Six is Not important. But this is a way to illustrate how multiple perspectives can coexist around a single thing. And
when we do that and we account for all of those different points of view, we get an accurate understanding and a full understanding of the things that we're thinking about. And one of the things we're going to go to the next slide is that taking multiple perspectives isn't just about seeing things through other things with Eyeballs or anthropomorphic perspectives. We need to challenge ourselves to also take conceptual perspectives, the kinds of things that don't have eyeballs, right? And this is the list of the most um most common conceptual perspectives that we need to take on
systems to really understand them more fully. So, what we want to do is kind of stretch our thinking and understanding beyond beyond just sort of Human-centered viewpoints to get a fuller or more accurate picture of the kinds of systems we're thinking about. And here's an illustration of what a perspective circle can look like. So, if you want to think about something like organizational change, which is the gray box, that's the view, you can see from three different points, CEO, employee, and customer, that they're all going to see different things, different parts of organizational change. Whereas
CEO may Be focused more on a strategic shift, an employee might focus more on change in daily work or process changes, and a customer might notice something in the culture of the company. But we need to consider different um different points of view on the thing that we're thinking about. And that means we need to integrate multiple perspectives, not just take one view of a system when we're thinking about it. And so, when you change your Perspective, what's important is you're not just shifting your view, you're actually changing the entire mental model that you're working
from, right? Because when you change the perspective, the other things that are going to shift are the distinctions you're making, the relationships that you're seeing or not seeing, the way you're grouping things into part-whole systems, and the meaning, generally, the mental model that you're building or the meaning that You're assigning to the thing you're thinking about. And perspective circle had a huge increase in problem-solving abilities, 447% after just 1 minute of learning it. Because taking multiple perspectives is how you move beyond Remember Derek said we only take our own perspective, a quarter, I think it
was like a quarter of a person takes anything other than. So, this is one of Those gaps that it fills. Really asking ourselves to challenge ourselves and see multiple perspectives is how we rectify that. So, these simple moves and the core questions that go with them, these are very practical, powerful tools that you can use to become more of a systems thinker. And what's really important about this, especially in the age of AI, is the ability to ask better questions, Structural questions about information is really a new superpower, right? These are the everyday thinking habits
that are going to really lead to more clarity, insight, all of those kinds of things, right? And the reason that matters so much is and the reason One thing that's important if you're feeling overwhelmed, I know this is, you know, a lot to take in in an hour, but you don't have to feel overwhelmed, Right? Derek, tell them. Yeah, well, a lot of a lot of what happens is people say, "Oh, this sounds interesting, but it's a little, you know, it's like drinking from a fire hose a little bit." Um cuz we're got an hour
to talk about 30 years of research. Uh But the thing is, it's not about whether or not you're going to use DSRP. You're already and Have always been doing DSRP and you've already and always been doing these moves. You're just not entirely aware of that. So, you're not really choosing whether to use these things, you're choosing to be aware that that is how your brain is processing information. So, better thinking is purposefully applying these moves to understand your thinking and to be able to change it, to adapt it to whatever System or reality that you're
in or situation or whatever system or reality that you're designing for. Um So, that's really important that it's it's You don't really get to choose whether you use DSRP, you're already using it. What you get to choose is how aware you are of it and how much control you have over changing it. Now, this brings us to something really Important. Um and the research of of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, he wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow. And what that book talked about is that we operate in with two powerful thinking modes. Uh and the
first he called system one. And that's the one we use the most of the time, about 95% of the time. It's fast, it's intuitive, it's emotional, it's automatic, and it is you you don't need to do anything to to have it happen, Right? So, it's low cost. The It only has one um little downside, and that is that it's massively prone to error. So, that's kind of a big downside, right? That's where these mental moves come in. They can give us a way to interrupt our autopilot and bring more awareness and structure to our thinking.
Now, Kahneman talks about uh a second mode of thinking, which he calls system two thinking. It's slower, it's more deliberate, and it's metacognitive. It's more aware of itself. This is where we think in loops, evaluate evidence, see feedback, and reason systemically. It's much more accurate, but it's slow. It takes more effort and more time. So, here's the tradeoff. System one is fast, but wrong a lot. System two is more accurate, but frustratingly slow. And the question that we really have to Ask ourselves, you know, I don't have to tell you what it's like to live
in today's age, which is pretty fast, and you have to be right or accurate, is is are those the only two options? Fast and wrong a lot or slow and accurate? Well, our research shows that there are there's a third option. There's system three thinking. And it is fast and accurate. Now, it doesn't mean that it's a silver bullet, though. It doesn't mean that There's no downside. The just like anything, there's a downside. There's effort involved. And the effort is practice. The effort is practice. If you practice, then this fast and accurate thinking becomes your
default. That's what we've discovered. And um here's a good example of of putting this in in real-world context uh and something that we really really need to see. Look at how high performers operate. Elite athletes, musicians, special forces operators, their time is mostly spent training with short, intentional bursts of performance. Training is not optional or occasional. It's continuous, deliberate, and structured to improve performance before, that's key, before it matters. Now, compare that to the corporate world that we live in today. Most of our time Is spent performing, meetings, emails, decisions, delivery. Training is usually compressed
into that that one training day. And it's often disconnected from work. The assumption is if we just perform more, we'll get better. But that's not how performance actually improves. High performers separate training from performance on purpose. They practice skills, mental models, and Decision-making outside of the moment of pressure. If we want better results at work, we don't need more performance. We need more deliberate training, practice, not training like sitting in front of a talking head. Practice, individual practice embedded in real work. This is about flipping the script. Train like high performers, not like organizations stuck
in constant Execution mode. So, one of the things that our research says globally, all of the different things that we've studied over the years, is it really comes down to practice. It's not about learning the concepts of systems thinking. Those, as our research shows, can be taught to people in less than a minute. But the practice of those things so that so that it becomes muscle memory of this muscle that we have up here is the key. It's something you get better at by Doing it through practice. And then, when you're in the stressful situation
or the complex situation, it is your default. You don't have to think about your thinking, you just do it because you've practiced it. So, if you practice these moves, just to sort of summarize, um you will master advanced thinking and systems thinking skills. You'll outperform 90% of your peers. Um You'll enhance your leadership and decision-making because it because like we said in the beginning, systems thinking then ties to systems leadership very deeply. You'll build shared mental models with your team, which means that you'll all be rowing in the same direction and you'll understand when you
think you have a shared mental model, but you actually don't, which happens all the time. And of course, solving complex problems faster and more accurately and with clarity is critical, especially in systems engineering. So that's kind of our our our talk for today. We're I think Do we have Q&A or something? Yes, we do. We have a lot of questions. First, I wanted to thank you for a great and fascinating presentation. Looking through the questions, I'll I'll only be able to cover a fraction of them. So I'll send all of the questions to you and
then if you want to prepare a response, we can post that with the with the recording. So a couple relate to the population of your study. One was what was the population and domain of your study? The other is did the study include professional physicists and other PhD level researchers? It was a general population study. So it really included self-selection of people who were general pop. Which could have included physicists and other Yeah, it was designed to match the census distribution of education, race, all of those things. So it was meant to match the the
census distribution. Right. Next one, you mentioned emotional Intelligence. What level of raw emotional intelligence do people need to make use of these? That's a great question and I I wish we had more time cuz we could do a whole thing on emotional intelligence. There's research that actually shows that if you want to develop your um emotional intelligence, you would be better off, I kid you not, you'd be better off increasing your metacognition, which is what DSRP does, Than training on actual emotional intelligence, which is kind of surprising. That in other words, emotional intelligence really gives
the wrong impression, the name. Emotional intelligence is really about emotional regulation. And a huge part of that is having your feelings and your thinkings not conflated, separating them, distinguishing them Out, and then being able to sort of walk through what's going on emotionally, and of course, expressing those emotions in more appropriate or regulated ways. So a lot of what we've seen is that learning these metacognitive skills of DSRP and this and the moves that we showed you really enhances emotional intelligence. There's a couple of questions relating to age. What's the youngest cohort that you have
taught these six moves to? And Can you please share how you teach kindergartners? I'd like to teach in my daughter's kindergarten. Yes, yes. So the youngest classroom we ever worked with was pre-K and kindergarten, so three to four-year-olds. Um I will say what's really really remarkable about DSRP is that it doesn't matter what context you're in. So for example, with kindergartners, they're Distinguishing between colors, red versus blue versus yellow versus green, primary versus not. They're making relationships between themselves and the community. So it's really about if you want to teach if your daughter that's in
kindergarten, when you're when you're talking about things with your daughter, ask the questions about how they're thinking about things, not the things that they're thinking about. So how did you See the difference between red and blue? How did you, you know, did you see a the relationship between the and you can actually use some of those words, but you can also use synonyms like the connections is the same as relationships, right? Differentiating. So you can use synonyms for those those four patterns very well. You can also always have eyeglasses to change the perspective they're looking
at things from. We've done that in Classrooms a lot. Um Three-year-olds struggle a little bit more with perspective because of theory of mind. So usually kids up to four or five can do the perspective stuff. But it's really just changing the the the way that you're questioning them and opening them up to seeing how they're understanding things. We love working >> add I would I would just add to that that what what is most rewarding about the Work for me that we do is is um we train special forces, we train high-level scientists, systems engineers,
you know, Department of War, you you name it. Some of the most complex problems in the world we are involved in in helping people solve. And we train those people in exactly the moves we just showed you. And we train kindergartners and preschoolers and third graders and eighth graders and our Grad students in exactly the same thing. Yeah. Can I say one more thing about kindergartners while I'm thinking about it? We had a very very very early on had a model classroom that was a kindergarten pre-K kindergarten class. We trained the teacher very well. She
used DSRP thinking skills in everything that she was teaching. Those kindergartners at the end of the year hit every single benchmark for Kindergarten, a third of the benchmarks for first grade, and they had to up-train a teacher for first grade and kept that class together so that they could continue that work. So it really has huge impacts for young kids. And likening it to a backpack they take through grades, through topics, where they know how they're understanding things, it completely changes their educational trajectory. You can tell we love the the kindergartners. >> [laughter] >> So
there's there's another group of questions relating to the large organizations. One is how can we practice systems thinking, especially the zoom in zoom out move, in large organizations where roles are highly specialized? Another one is um Jerome, I'll get I'll get there. Um how do you take the corporate workforce and get them to train outside the corporate environment? And do you have tips for applying these moves to improve team functioning on a project, such as aligning objectives, without getting bogged down in the complexities internal to the product being developed? You want me You want me
to take that One? That's kind of a >> [clears throat] >> triple or quadruple-barreled question, so I'll try to try to hit on all of it. I guess the thing I would say is we we work a lot with organizations, many of the biggest organizations and small organizations, entrepreneurial organizations. Um and what I would say is that the moves we just showed you transfer and transform teams. So you think that it's like specific things That you do at the team level, and there are some of those things. We don't really have enough time to talk
about those right now. But I would say that the moves that we just shared with you are 80% of what you do in organizations to get them to work at multiple levels, take perspectives at those multiple specialized levels, get on the same page, make that page compressed so that Everybody can understand it in a way that is shared, even though if you uncompress it, it's full of detail. So that's kind of I don't want to go too far into the weeds on this about what we do with organizations cuz we don't have a lot of
time, but it's almost like an 80/20 rule. Those those simple moves we showed you really don't change too much in terms of how you apply them at the organizational level. You just get people practicing Those moves and you transform your teams. May I only thing I would add to that is one thing we've seen, Andy, is when people in organizations understand how they're building mental models, they have a corollary understanding, which is others are also building mental models, which means the conversation becomes about my mental model versus your mental model. Yeah. So it does two
things. It reduces sort of interpersonal conflict, Right? Because it's not about me or you, it's about my mental model, my understanding, and your mental model understanding. And it also means that um there's an impetus and a language for building shared mental models to framework and effort before you invest time and energy into it. And that transforms organizations, their efficiency, it transforms how they talk to one another. They're focused on the Structure of how they're thinking about things. And it just it has a completely it has a massive effect on teams. Apologies to all of those
who raised questions which we didn't have time to address, but as I mentioned, I'll summarize the questions for Laura and Derek, and they can respond either individually or via the website so that people can see the the responses. I want to thank you again for this very Informative presentation, and thank you to the audience for your questions and your time. Uh next slide, please. Oh, that's out of order. That's okay. You can go to the next >> Oh, you want this one? Uh um yes. So as a quick reminder, you can find the previous webinar
in recordings in the INCOSE library, and you can now claim one PDU credit towards your systems engineering professional recertification By attending this webinar. Next slide. Again, thank you to our sponsors, uh Caltech and Dassault Systèmes for their generosity in supporting the INCOSE webinar series. I'll also mention that the 36th INCOSE International Symposium will be held in Yokohama, Japan from 13th to 18th of June 2026. Registration is now open, so now is your opportunity to plan to go there. Uh next slide, please. Thank you all again, and we hope to see you again soon. Goodbye. Bye.
