Keynote Conference: "The Big Picture - Integrating Systems Thinking with Design" Dr. Pourdehnad, University of Pennsylvania. In the Third International Congress of Systems Sciences. Mexican Academy of The Systems Science. July 7th & 8th. Universidad Iberoamericana, México, D.F.

1. The Big Picture – Integrating Systems
Thinking With Design
John Pourdehnad, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
The Third International Congress of System Sciences
July 7, 2011
Mexican Academy of The Systems Sciences
Universidad Iberoamericana,
Mexico, D.F.

2. Design Thinking Is A Failed
Experiment. So What's Next?
Bruce Nussbaum, one of Design Thinking's
biggest advocates, is moving on to something
new. Here, he begins defining "Creative
Quotient.”
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663558/design-
thinking-is-a-failed-experiment-so-whats-next

3. Design
• Design, as an activity, has been around
forever.
• Almost everything around us, except for
nature, has been designed
• An approach to make purposeful change in
social systems

4. Design & Its Consequences
• Design in all its manifestation has greatly
helped our human societies to make
extraordinary progress in every aspect of
human life
• At the same time, many of our societal woes
are also the unintended and unacceptable
consequences of our design activities.

5. Design & Its Consequences
(Cont’d)
• Today, we are confronted with many wicked
problems in the world that refuse to go away.
• These include environmental, economic and
political crises that threaten to lower the
quality of life for many.

6. Systems Thinking
• Systems Thinking is rather new
• It was developed in the early 1950s
• A new mindset and a perspective to better
understand the world and tackle it’s ever
more complex problems

7. So what is being done today?
• First, there is gradual acknowledgment of the
existence of diverse organizational contexts
(simple, complicated and complex) that
require different approaches to planning,
management, leadership and problem
solving.

8. Snowden’s Decision Making
Context
• Simple : The Domain of Best Practice
• Complicated : The Domain of Experts
• Complex : The Domain of Emergence
• Chaotic : The Domain of Rapid Response
» Source: David J. Snowden, Mary E. Boone, “A
Leader's Framework for Decision Making,” Harvard
Business Review Article, Nov 1, 2007

9. The Cynefin Framework
9

10. IBM 2010 CEO Study

11. The Case for Complexity
Mark Schenk from Anecdote uses Pecha Kucha format to describe
complexity using the Cynefin framework
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUJviaTi7VA&feature=related

12. Different Approaches to Planning,
Management and Leadership
From To
Management Leadership
Predict and Forecast Anticipate
Analyze Data Recognize Patterns
Simplify – “KISS” See and Deal With The Whole
Pay Attention To Details Pay Attention To Relationships
Rational Thinking Intuitive Thinking
Learn a Skill Training Nurture Cognitive abilities
Think Algorithmically Think Heuristically
Analytical Thinking (scientific, based Design Thinking (based on abduction
on induction and deduction thinking) thinking)

13. Design Thinking
• This process of thinking, purportedly leading
to systematic creative breakthroughs, is
known as design thinking – a topic sweeping
through management science like a tsunami.
• One of the central tenets of design thinking is
the importance of combining existing ideas in
unique ways.

14. All People Are Designers
• Design is basic to all human activity.
• Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful
order
• The planning and patterning of any act towards a
desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design
process
• All that we do, almost all the time, is design
• Any attempt to separate design, to make it a “thing-
by-itself”, works counter to the inherent value of
design as the primary underlying matrix of life

15. Design Thinking
• While design thinking may be the topic de
jour within the domain of business, the
process of creation through combination has
a long history.
• In his 1964 book, The Act of Creation,
Koestler writes, “Invention or discovery, be it
in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place
by combining ideas”

16. Where Good Ideas Come From?
by Steven Johnson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

17. Where Good Ideas Come From?
• If one particular style of thought stands out for creative
geniuses, it is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude mere
mortals. Call it a facility to connect the unconnected by forcing
relationships that enable them to see things to which others are
blind” (Michalko, “Thinking like a genius” )
• “…combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in
productive thought.” Certainly, Einstein was not the first to
investigate energy, mass or light. However, he was the first to
combine them in such a unique way when he derived his
famous equation E = mc2.

18. Design thinking
• New research suggests that creative genius is, at least in part,
based on knowing “how” to think instead of “what” to think
• Design thinking gives organizations a competitive advantage
because it encourages innovation by teaching “how” to think
instead of “what” to think. Today’s companies are too large and
complex to be managed in the “top down” style popular in the
20th Century.
• Our education system focuses almost entirely on analytical
thinking which uses inductive and deductive logic. While these
are undoubtedly important, for the United States to remain
competitive, schools need to teach student to think synthetically
and creatively.

19. Design Thinking
 The designers who can solve the most wicked problems do it
through collaborative integrative thinking, using abductive logic,
which means the logic of what might be. Conversely, deductive
and inductive logic are the logic of what should be or what is.
 In traditional organizations do you get rewarded for thinking
about what might be? Encouraged? No . . . these firms can only
do what they know how to do and constraints are the enemy—
as opposed to the design firm, where constraints bring
challenge and excitement.
Source: Design Thinking and How It Will Change Management Education: An
Interview and Discussion DAVID DUNNE ROGER MARTIN, Joseph L. Rotman
School of Management.

20. Web 2.0 (Enterprise 2.0)
• As the economy becomes increasingly
knowledge-based and global, where the core
values are mass collaboration and innovation,
new technologies and broader and richer
channels of communication allow for
organizational stakeholders to combine their
knowledge to inspire fresh ideas and realize
new opportunities.

21. Web 2.0 (Enterprise 2.0)
• Enterprise 2.0, a system-wide
enabling technology that facilitates the
participation of an organization’s
stakeholders and employees in the
process of creating a successful
business model.

22. Central Question Facing
Management
• In today’s knowledge-based economy, an
organization’s value is increasingly derived from its
intellectual assets. The challenge of creating value
through the engagement of the stakeholders in
design activities in “business model” innovation is
paramount. Therefore, the central question facing
management is: How can business opportunities and
value be created from the knowledge that resides
within individuals and organizations?

23. Open Innovation
• Innovation is a process that takes place somewhere
in your organization, or perhaps in someone’s mind.
The result, in any case, can be an insight, a new
idea, a product, a strategy, or perhaps a new
business model.
• The word “innovation” refers to an attribute, a
process, and a result. This innovativeness refers to
its distinctiveness, its originality, perhaps its
usefulness, and most importantly its value

24. Open Innovation
• To be considered an innovation in business, the
result must be increased value in the form of new or
improved functionality, reduced cost, a price increase
(good for the seller), a price decrease (good for the
buyer), better margin for the seller, or some
combination of these.

25. Open Innovation
• Until now, closed innovation was the paradigm in
which most firms operated.
• Most innovating companies kept their discoveries highly secret and
made no attempt to assimilate information from outside their
own R&D labs.
• However, in recent years the world has seen major
advances in technology and society, which have
facilitated the diffusion of information.
• Not the least of these advances are electronic communication systems,
including the Internet.

26. Open Innovation
• Open Innovation is a term promoted by Henry
Chesbrough:
• “Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and
outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal
innovation, and expand the markets for external use
of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes
that firms can and should use external ideas as well
as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to
market, as they look to advance their technology.”

27. Crowdsourcing
• Companies across varied industries have
extended their search for innovation beyond
their own walls by engaging in dialogs with
disparate sources of ideas including
consumers, partners and even competitors.
One popular method of gathering ideas from
external sources is through the use of
“crowdsourcing” which collect

28. Crowdsourcing Examples
http://www.innocentive.com/
http://www.ninesigma.com/

29. An Example of Crowdsourcing

30. Systems Thinking as an
Alternative Mindset
• Quote by Einstein that says: "We can't solve
problems by using the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them."
• The value of systems thinking is being recognized as
a powerful alternative point of view that incorporates
synthetic thinking in addition to the traditional
analytical thinking, and affords us with a long view to
anticipate how a particular solution will play out over
time.

31. Systems Thinking: What is a
System?
• Def. – System
– Whole which consists
of a set of two or
more parts
– Three requirements:
• Each part must affect
behavior
• All parts must be
interconnected
• All subsets must effect
behavior, none can
act independently

32. Definition of Systems Thinking
• Systems thinking is a “holistic approach to
understanding that focuses on the way
that a system's constituent parts interrelate
and how systems work over time and
within the context of larger systems:”
• (searchcio.techtarget.com)
• In order to understand systems thinking,
we must first understand systems…

33. Steps to a Systems Approach
• Synthesis & Analysis
– Synthesis = putting things together
– Analysis = taking things apart
• 3 Steps
(1)Identify a containing whole (system) of which
the thing to be explained is a part
(2)Explain the behavior or properties of the
containing whole
(3)Then explain the behavior or properties of
the thing to be explained in terms of its role(s)
or function(s) within its containing whole

34. Analytical and Synthetic
Thinking
• Analytical Thinking
– The object/idea to be explained is
considered a whole to be taken apart
– Example: Integrating by parts in calculus
• Synthetic Thinking
– The object/idea to be explained is
considered a part of a larger whole
– Comparable to systems thinking
– Example: Observing a Rolex for both its
intrinsic and extrinsic values

35. Change in Method of Inquiry
From Mechanistic To Social Systems
Thinking Thinking
Analysis Synthesis
(An explanation of the whole derived from explanation (An explanation of the whole derived from explanation
of its parts.) explaining the role of the system in the larger system of
which it is a part.)
Reductionism Expansionism
(The belief that everything can be reduced.) (The system is always a sub-system of some lager system.)
Cause and Effect Producer–Product
(Environmental free theory of explanation, a cause (Environmental full theory of explanation as opposed to
needs to both necessary and sufficient in order to have cause and effect where the importance of the environment is
the corresponding effect.) stressed.)
Determinism Indeterminism
(Fatalism, prior condition ) (Probabilistic, observe and discover.)
Research Design
(The embodiment of the above to arrive at instructions (The embodiment of the above to facilitate learning.
based on theory.) Designing the whole systems means creating a system
configuration that is optimum.)

36. In Conclusion!
• Evidence shows that systems thinking
integrated with design thinking is the
appropriate mindset and methodology
for coping with highly complex
situations.