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Learning Systems Thinking: Essential Nonlinear Skills and Practices for Software Professionals by Diana Montalion EPUB

Welcome to the systems age, where software professionals are no longer building software - we're building systems of software.

Change is continuously deployed across software ecosystems coordinated by responsive infrastructure.

In this world of increasing relational complexity, we need to think differently. Many of our challenges are systemic. This book shows you how systems thinking can guide you through the complexity of modern systems. Rather than relying on traditional reductionistic approaches, author Diana Montalion shows you how to expand your skill set so we can think, communicate, and act as healthy systems.

Systems thinking is a practice that improves your effectiveness and enables you to lead impactful change. Through a series of practices and real-world scenarios, you'll learn to shift your perspective in order to design, develop, and deliver better outcomes.

You'll learn:
How linear thinking limits your ability to solve system challenges
Common obstacles to systems thinking and how to move past them
New skills and practices that will transform how you think, learn, and lead
Methods for thinking well with others and creating sound recommendations
How to measure success in the midst of complexity and uncertainty

From the Publisher

A System of Thinking

This book is unabashedly about abstract thinking and reasoning. It describes practices, principles, tools, and ways of looking at your circumstances that increase your capacity for doing hard things. Software professionals are increasingly faced with relationally complex circumstances; these circumstances require systems thinking. Software is becoming systems of software. Here, you’ll find a system for thinking about systems.

We have been taught to think linearly. We need that skill to develop software. We also need to think nonlinearly and develop approaches that support us when our usual reductionistic approaches fail. As knowledge workers in the systems age, we are developing approaches that help us think about, and improve, the systems we design and deliver.

Our thinking generates the concepts that we rely on when designing our systems. When our concepts work together in harmony, supporting a system’s purpose, they have integrity. Fred Brooks says that “conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in systems design.” Without conceptual integrity, our software systems are built by “many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.” Whether we recognize it or not, the coherence and interconnectedness of our concepts shape our technological systems.

To think in systems and create conceptual integrity, you need to become adept at shifting your perspective. Practices like learning, modeling with others, and discovering the root causes of systemic challenges support this mental flexibility. In Part I, you’ll be introduced to systems thinking, practice cultivating conceptual integrity, and discover the mindshifts that help you think in systems.

About the Author
Diana has 20 years of experience delivering transformative initiatives, independently or as part of a professional services group, to clients including Stanford, The Gates Foundation and Teach For All. She has served as principal architect for The Economist and The Wikimedia Foundation. She founded Mentrix Group, a consultancy providing technology architecture, systems leadership and workshops on nonlinear approaches. Writing, teaching and thinking about thinking are her favorite hobbies.

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