You are an analytical thinker. You take pride in it. On your resume you write "analytical problem solver." Your job title may even carry the word analyst. You deal with systems, you try to understand systems, you act on them and intervene in them, all using analytical thinking. And we would not be wrong to call you an analytical systems thinker. So far, we hope, there is no disagreement.
Now let us begin the disagreement. When did humans start to think analytically? Any idea? Because humans were not thinking analytically thousands of years ago. No one said "let us analyze this" five hundred years ago. Analytical thinking is a roughly five-hundred-year-old thinking paradigm, and it was the very thing that gave birth to science. So ask the next question.. what kind of thinking existed before analytical thinking? And whatever it was, it must have had limitations, limitations that analytical thinking came along and filled.
And here is the part worth sitting with. Filling that gap was hard. Crazy hard. Because people were thinking inside a paradigm without being aware that it was a paradigm, without being aware of its steps or its limits. Learning a new paradigm is hard for exactly this reason.. it demands that you first become aware of the thinking paradigm you are already using, then become aware of its limitations, and only then become open to a new one. It took five hundred years for analytical thinking to spread to the point where most humans now analyze in every waking moment, without the faintest awareness of how they are analyzing. It is like being indoctrinated in a method since childhood, before our brains were even fully formed, so that we now call our thinking "analysis" without ever having seen its steps.
To be clear, at SystemsWay we are big fans of analytical thinking. We use it constantly. But we asked a question.. what if analytical thinking has limitations of its own? What if those very limitations are the reason our scientific and technological knowledge grows exponentially, while our social systems, our democracies, our organizations, our management, our teams, our medical and health systems, and countless others, do not get better at all? If you are open to that possibility, read on. Because at SystemsWay we make a case that the root of much of what ails modern society is this.. every smart person applies analytical thinking to make sense of systems and to act on them, without any awareness of its limits. And just as humans five hundred years ago were slow to learn from experience, we are slow now. So our mechanical and technological systems keep getting better, and our social systems do not.
So here is the real question. What if there were a newer SystemsWay thinking paradigm, one that covers the limitations of analytical thinking in making sense of the systems around you? Would you be interested? We are sure you would be, and you are probably waiting for us to just tell you what it is.
We would love to. But it would be futile. You would ignore it, or make fun of it, for one simple reason.. you would try to make sense of it using your analytical thinking, and it would not make sense. A thinking paradigm cannot be learned on top of another one, because the need for a new paradigm exists precisely where the old one has a blind spot. You cannot see a blind spot with the eye that has it.
That is why SystemsWay is an awareness school. First we make you aware of the specific steps your mind takes when it thinks analytically. Then we show you how those steps are magnificent for understanding and intervening in mechanical and technological systems, and terrible for understanding and intervening in living ecosystems and social systems. And only then do we fill that gap, with the newer SystemsWay thinking paradigm. And once you have it, it changes how you lead yourself, how you lead your company, how you lead your family, your society.. all of it.
Because think about where analytical thinking fails you already. You can convert almost any mechanical system into a formula and solve it. But the moment you lead a team, run a department, deal with people, you run into trouble. Disagreements are everywhere. Projects fail. And your answer is always the same shape.. more gates, more controls, more holding people accountable. Those are not solutions. They are the symptoms of analytical thinking applied to a system it was never built for.
But have you ever actually asked yourself what analytical thinking is? What its steps are? What kinds of systems it begins to fail on? Most people cannot answer, not because they are avoiding it, but because no one ever paused to ask. Making you aware of that cannot be done in a single blog post, and we would not want to pretend otherwise.
So join SystemsWay, and for the first time, become aware of the analytical thinking you have always used. Become aware of its limits. And then learn SystemsWay thinking, which will finally make solvable the social-system problems that never were, and let you live a more fulfilled life. This is not a spirituality class.. we do not teach spirituality. It is a philosophy class. But we will not teach you Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel and the rest. We believe much of that is bad philosophy. We will teach you what we believe is good philosophy.. Systems Philosophy. We are a philosophy school, but not a school of the history of philosophy. We deliver the one philosophy we believe is right. There is no other school of philosophy that does that, that tells you plainly which philosophy it believes is right and which is wrong.
Join us, and experience for the first time what you should have experienced at twenty-five, which is the right age for it. But it is never too late, especially if you lead systems of which people are a part.