# Complexity Science- 3 Systems Thinking

A brief introduction to systems thinking.

For full courses, transcriptions and downloads please see: http://www.complexityacademy.io

Transcription:

System thinking is a way of describing the world in a more holistic manner based upon the model of a system, but lets start from the beginning.

We can understand the world as things, that is parts or components and their relations, that is how they are connected or fit together.

So take a car for example, it is made up of parts, car parts such as engine, wheels and so on and these parts are put together or organized in a specific way so as to make them function as a vehicle of transportation.

Now we call a group of things that are not organized in this way a set. So we would call a group of cups on a table a set of cups because unlike the parts to our car they have not been designed to serve some collective function.

Because the group of cups is simple the sum of its parts we would describe them by describing the individual properties of the each cup and this would tell us everything we needed to know about them.

This approach to describing thing is called analysis or reductionism, reductionism is the traditional approach taken within modern science that tries to describe complex phenomena in terms of their individual parts.

Now take the human body that is highly organized through a complex set of relations between its parts. Out of the arrangement of these parts in a specific way we get the overall functioning of a…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2014
- Runtime: 3 min
- By: Complexity Academy
- Genres: Science
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Complexity_Science-_3_Systems_Thinking.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Complexity Academy
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/57997558?play=1)