Systems Thinkers presents a biographical history of the field of systems thinking, by examining the life and work of thirty of its major thinkers. It discusses each thinker´s key contributions, the way this contribution was expressed in practice and the relationship between their life and ideas. This discussion is supported by an extract from the thinker´s own writing, to give a flavour of their work and to give readers a sense of which thinkers are most relevant to their own interests.

Systems thinking is necessarily interdisciplinary, so that the thinkers selected come from a wide range of areas - biology, management, physiology, anthropology, chemistry, public policy, sociology and environmental studies among others. A significant aim of the book is to broaden and deepen the reader´s interest in systems writers, providing an appetising ‘taster´ for each of the 30 thinkers, so that the reader is encouraged to go on to study the published works of the thinkers themselves.

This is a book about the people who shaped an idea – that to make sense of the complexity of the world, we need to look at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting it down into ist parts and looking at each in isolation. In this book we call that idea systems thinking, although others have called it by other names (such as systems theory or systems sciences). Within this idea we include a number of areas which have independent origins but have tended over time to become interlinked while retaining their distinctiveness – general systems theory, cybernetics, complexity theory and system dynamics among others.
Our focus in the book is on people and how their personalities, lives and links with each other shaped these ideas. Other books have been written on the ideas as such, describing and classifying them in various ways, presenting a history of the ideas or arguing for the importance of one perspective or another. By focusing on the creators of the ideas, and by taking a broad look at a range of areas, we aim to shed a different light on systems thinking.
The people we write about are all fascinating, although in quite different ways. Some are widely known as the originators of one or another systems approach; some are very well known within the systems community but less so outside it; while others are well known figures who are less widely acknowledged as systems thinkers. Some are associated with a particular academic discipline, such as management, sociology or environmental studies, while others ranged widely across disciplines.
Each of the 30 authors in this book is discussed in a separate chapter, comprising two parts: first, a discussion of their life and work, and second, an extract from their writing. The extract, necessarily short (just a few pages) is intended to be a ‘taster’ to show the author’s style of writing, their concerns and interests, and to encourage you to read more of their work. In many cases, we have edited it to bring out the author’s main argument, while preserving their unique voice. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide to their key ideas – it is unlikely that by reading the extract in this book, you will be able to apply the author’s ideas, but we hope it will give you a sense of why the ideas are so significant, and which of the authors you might want to find out more about.