Abstract:

The world is undergoing a dramatic transformation and societies are concerned regarding the raise in complexity, with the emergence of acronyms such as VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) and BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible). Businesses are concerned with acquiring skills to face challenging technological threats and new business concepts. From other perspectives, such as security and defence the problems seem alike. Global leaders are concerned with new forms of doing “business” and in every decade have been launching some new concept with a fancy name and accompanying fanfare, in a desperate way to fade away problems and concerns. However, the core body of knowledge to address these similar paradigms has not been included in most curricula in a systematic fashion as others subjects, such as, grammar or maths. From another viewpoint, the number of job adverts without any mention of a high school degree is also rising which suggests that businesses are more concerned with skills than with diplomas and degrees, suggesting a growing divorce between academia and business. Weighting both concepts on the same scale, it is not hard to foresee a considerable opportunity for both, higher education curriculums to evolve toward the inclusion of approaches to deal with complexity, and also reduce the perceived growing gap between academia and business. This would demand the systematic introduction of systems thinking, lato sensu, into academia, schools and high schools curricula, as just a very small number of institutions currently do it; but the world need a massive transformation in education which demands a fine attention to change management in order to make such relaunch of systems thinking in education a reality – not the least resistance from the status quo. Moreover, the subject is not a short one, but a whole field with several approaches an teaching paradigms – from conceptual models, to modelling and simulation – which are not as common as one would think. To make matters worse, some research suggest systems thinking is not a natural act, which means that due to the brain wiring some people are natural systems thinkers, others can be taught systems thinking, and still others, due to the same reason, aren’t able to effectively learn systems thinking. Based on a Theory of Constraints approach, this paper proposes a way to successfully accelerate the introduction of systems thinking in education in a systematic way, in order to contribute to harness complexity in a visible world transformation, which is bringing fear into societies.

Keywords:

Complexity, Systems Thinking, System Dynamics, Transforming Education.