Systems Thinking, 3rd Edition

Foreword to the Second Edition

Professor Thomas Lee of MIT was a dear friend. I met him in the early 1980s when he was the Secretary General of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Tom was obsessed with the notion that two distinct traditions of systems thinking — Ackoff's interactive design and Forrester's systems dynamics — were complementary. For years he insisted that we should work together to merge the two prominent systems methodologies into a single unified one. But at the time I was preoccupied with two other exciting conceptions. The first one was consideration of culture as an operating system that guides social organizations toward a predefined order. The second was a hunch that iteration is the key for ...