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What Exactly is Systems Thinking?

Systems Thinking makes software development more efficient

Chunting Wu
4 min readDec 2, 2024
My girl

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This week I held a few workshops within my organization to explain what Systems Thinking is and some of the common tools used in Systems Thinking, supported by an ongoing classic case study from my organization.

While gathering material for these workshops, two common questions often came up.

  1. Will you guide us through the design of an e-commerce system, an instant messaging system, or any system in this workshop?
  2. We don’t usually have the opportunity to redesign a system, so do we still need to learn systems thinking?

These questions are closely related. Essentially, they both ask whether Systems Thinking is the same as software architecture design.

The answer is definitely no.

Systems Thinking is a methodology that goes beyond software architecture design and can be applied to any situation and any problem.

So, what exactly is Systems Thinking? How does this relate to our daily routine?

What is System?

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Chunting Wu
Chunting Wu

Written by Chunting Wu

Architect at SHOPLINE. Experienced in system design, backend development, and data engineering.

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