Growing Wings on the Way: Systems Thinking for Messy Situations

This book is about dealing with messes. Sometimes known as 'wicked problems', messes (or messy situations) are fairly easy to spot: it's hard to know where to start; we can't define them; everything seems to connect to everything else and depends on something else having been done first; we get in a muddle thinking about them; we often try to ignore some aspect/s of them; when we finally do something about them, they usually get worse; they're so entangled that our first mistake is usually to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem.
Systems Thinking offers a range of good ways to approach these situations and unravel them. Rosalind Armson is one of the world's foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them. Specifically, she sets out a series of sophisticated and challenging - but practical and easily learned - skills and techniques for thinking better when you're 'in a mess'.
The skills and techniques that she covers (with rules, advice and practical guidance on each one) in this book include: Escaping Mental Traps (including History Traps, Habit Traps, Double Binds, Value Rigidity and Action Traps); Working with System Definitions; Diagnosing with Multiple-Cause Diagrams; Drawing Rich Pictures; Drawing and using Influence Diagrams; Understanding messes with Systems Maps; Building Human-Activity System Diagrams; Using the 5Es of Efficacy, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Elegance and Ethicality;
Viewing messes through an Understandascope

Whether you're new to Systems Thinking or have long experience, the book invites you to develop your skills through working with your own messy situations. It's written for managers, project managers, team leaders, 'change leaders', strategists, policy makers and concerned citizens as well as university students from a broad set of disciplines. Organisations and readers in education, healthcare, environmental management, IT planning and social care are just a few of those likely to find it helpful.