The Education of a Systems Thinker

"Systems thinking is crucial to solving problems in the 21 st century," Don Knapp says, "but most people don’t understand it."

His education as a systems thinker began on field trips with his older architect brother Robert Knapp, chief designer of New York ’s Madison Square Garden and Boston ’s 30-acre Prudential Center . Unlike many architects who consider their building but not it’s site, site planner Deane Rundell said "Bob considered the building and the site as part of the same total plan."

Holistic or systems thinking holds that an organization or community functions not as a collection of elements in isolation (silos) but as a dynamic and complex system in which they interact with each other and their environment. It has been practiced since at least Leonardo’s time, according to Michael Gelb (How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci).

The thinking of MIT computer modeler Jay Forrester (Urban Dynamics), urban critic Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), architect and city planner Victor Gruen (The Heart of Our Cities), quality guru Edwards Deming (Out of the Crisis), writer William Whyte (Cluster Development), Ian McHarg(Design With Nature), Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith (The Wisdom of Teams), Jeffrey Liker (The Toyota Way), Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline) and others persuaded Don that problems can best be solved with a systems perspective and cross-functional teams.

He’s also learned from his interviews of systems thinkers including:  

John Evans, Professor of Business, University of North Carolina , Chapel Hill , and former board chair of the Baldrige National Quality Improvement Awards: "Organizations that have developed a natural conceptual foundation that recognizes and strengthens linkages are qualitatively different from those from those organizations that treat the various components of their approach to quality as nearly independent building blocks."

John Adams, Professor of Geography, University of Minnesota , "A metropolitan area is a living organism. All parts are connected and changes in one part inevitably stimulate later change in other parts…It’s hard for people to believe that something that happens here and now affects events at later times and other places."

Richard Bradley, Executive Director, Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District and former President, International Downtown Association: "While few people think about downtown as a system much less talk about it as such, the way in which some organizations are growing their downtown proves it is. In fact, it may be more appropriate to describe the downtown as a comprehensive system that encompasses an interconnected set of system elements, i.e. retail, housing, access, etc."

A community activist, Don has applied his education in coordinating the planning of a clustered housing development surrounded by a public golf course, coordinating urban development projects, advising cities on urban planning, writing and speaking including speaking at two recent sessions of the Indiana State Summit on Civic Engagement in Indianapolis.

Now, he says, "We have the biggest challenge in the 21 st Century - the need to achieve sustainability - the balancing of economic, environmental and social needs for present and future generations. It’s foundation is systems thinking and we better learn how to use it."

Contact Don, a former Executive Director of The Honeywell Foundation, Inc. and former urban affairs talk show host on Minnesota Public Television, to schedule his dialogue with your audience about Systems and Sustainability.