I have been thinking a lot about Systems Thinking recently. Will Larson writes in <i>An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management</i> that it's one of the most useful general tools he's discovered for approaching management problems. That inspired me to read Donella Meadows <i>Thing in Systems</i>, but even after reading that, I'm not sure how to apply it to engineering organizations. It's only tangential to this topic, but if anyone has a good course or book that works through examples which can be transferred to managing engineering teams or organizations, I'd be grateful. When I read most systems thinking materials I get the sense that they are mostly focused on civilization-level problems like global warming, rather than on ways that I can individually use it to understand and make changes within my more prosaic scope.<p>I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested.<p>I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.