Thorsteinn Siglaugsson has taken his writing and thinking about the “Logical Thinking Processes” from Theory of Constraints and compiled them into a booklet, From Symptoms to Causes: Applying the Logical Thinking Process to an Everyday Problem (published 2020 - I had only recently started following Siglaugsson’s writing). It took about an hour to read through the booklet and read through the diagrams. Siglaugsson takes the readers through a relatively common example of applying the main thinking tools and how they are sequenced from the Goal Tree, the Current Reality Tree, the Conflict Resolution Diagram (aka Evaporating Cloud), the Future Reality Tree, and the Prerequisite Tree.
For most people, these specific thinking tools are probably a jumble of words. For people into Theory of Constraints, these are familiar, if not always used, tools to help understand and design full solutions. But one of the main reasons for the book is to show how important thinking is in the world of systems thinking. As Siglaugsson describes, almost everyone when presented with “a problem” starts to describe solutions without fully understanding the situation - what are we striving for, what does this problem keep recurring? Even worse, when we’ve tried to “solve” these problems in the past, they’ve either generated new, unanticipated problems or the original problem didn’t really get resolved.
Thinking, whether in this form or others, is the key to Systems Thinking. Yes, understanding that things are connected is an important aspect of this. But doing something with that understanding requires thinking through the implications. Even if the system in question is particularly complicated - and what systems that we care about aren’t complicated to some degree?