I’ve been browsing the various lists of attributes that the curriculum-of-the-future should ideally develop, not least the ‘eight essential skills’ of listening, speaking, problem solving, creativity, staying positive, aiming high, leadership, and teamwork.
These are certainly all ‘good things’, and everyone reading this will undoubtedly have their own answer to the question “If you could add one more item to that list, what would it be?”.
It might indeed be highly informative to gather those ideas together, so let me get that ball rolling by offering a suggestion.
Systems thinking.
Different people might have different definitions of ‘systems thinking’, so let me explain what I think it is, and my reasons for advocating it as the ninth ‘essential skill’.
To me, systems thinking is the ability to understand the behaviour of ‘systems’, where my definition of a ‘system’ is ‘a community of connected entities’. That’s all rather abstract, so let me offer three examples.
The first is the sentence ‘I went to the bank’. In this case, the ‘system’ is the complete sentence, comprised of ‘entities’, each of which is a word in the English language. Those words, however, have not been thrown together randomly; rather, they are connected together in such a way as to cause something ‘magic’ to happen: the overall system (the sentence), comprised of a community of connected entities (the individual words), conveys meaning, for we all know what that sentence means.
Where, though, does that meaning reside? Not in any individual word, for a learned professor could study the word ‘went’ in isolation for a lifetime without ever discovering the meaning of ‘I went to the bank’. Rather, meaning is a property of the system-as-a-whole, this being a demonstration of the phenomenon known as ‘emergence’. Importantly, emergence is only apparent when a system is ‘well-connected’ with just the right entities connected together in just the right way: ‘bank I to went the’ doesn’t make any sense, but the entities, the words, are just the same, but in the wrong order; ‘I went to the’ might be a good line in a crime novel, uttered by a key witness prior to their untimely demise, but in more normal circumstances this fragment makes little sense since there is something missing.
What is the difference between, say, 11 people behaving as a high-performing team and those same 11 people behaving as a rabble? Is it something about their mutual inter-connectedness, and about having the right people in the right roles at the right time – just like the words in that sentence – so that an emergent property, a property we call ‘teamwork’, emerges? If it is, how does that inter-connectedness work, and how do we know that the right people are indeed in the right roles?
Systems are everywhere, and understanding them is, to my mind, an ‘essential skill’. And a skill readily incorporated within the conventional curriculum. Subjects such as Economics, Politics and Sociology are almost entirely about the behaviours of complex systems; and systems play a vital role in Philosophy, Religious Studies, Business Studies, Geography, Biology and Physics.
As regards the curriculum design, there is an extensive and well-documented body of knowledge on which to draw. The ‘systems perspective’ – that, ultimately, everything is connected to everything else, and that an intervention ‘here’ will, sooner or later, cause some effect ‘there’ – is ancient, and an integral feature of much Eastern philosophy, as well as being at the heart of the current environmental movement. Furthermore, systems thinking features in many university programmes (for example, at Cambridge, UCL,ICL, Exeter, Glasgow, MIT, Harvard, Stanford …, as well as the recently-launched ‘disruptor’ university LIS), it is a skill sought by the major consultancies (notably McKinsey), and is also now much encouraged by the Civil Service.
We all seek a curriculum to equip young people with the skills for a fulfilling mid-21st Century life. In addition to the ‘eight essentials’, my vote is for systems thinking to be the ninth.
What’s yours?
Dennis Sherwood is a management consultant with experience of solving complex problems. He has a Physics Masters from the University of Cambridge, an MPhil in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University and a PhD in biology from the University of California in San Diego. After being a consulting partner at Deloitte Haskins + Sells, and Coopers & Lybrand, he became an executive director at Goldman Sachs. He now runs his own business, The Silver Bullet Machine Manufacturing Company Limited, specializing in organizational creativity and innovation. He is author of 14 books.
