system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What is design and systems thinking?

I've referred to various definitions and examples but I don't think I still catch what it's all about.
gpt
Most people tend to think of complex dynamic systems in terms of individual components, without fully grasping how they interact and the impacts of those interactions.

Let's say you've got a team project due tomorrow. Collectively, your team needs to write a 20-page paper describing your work.

So you divide the work up into 5 sections, assign everyone a section and you all work independently. Everyone finishes their work by the deadline and you're all set, right?

Wrong. In all likelihood, none of you actually completed your task because certain elements of one section were dependent on the others - and you needed information from other group members to do a good job. The entire document as a whole needs review and markup based on standards established group-wide.

Simply "doing your job by the deadline" in this case is a strategy that leads to failure. You need to come up with mechanisms for coordinating the work beyond this simplistic notion of dividing up the work.

Moreover, you also have to deal with failure modes. Consider that slacker member of your group who never gets their work done. If they completely fail in their assignment, you'll lose points on your grade. So if the deadline is 9 am tomorrow, at what point will you need to do their work for them to complete in time? How do you communicate this to other team members so they're not doing redundant work?

'Systems thinking' is thinking about all of these issues that arise when coordinating different tasks and recognizing the inter-relationship between those tasks. It involves examining dependencies between tasks, and how unforeseen events can affect not just one particular task but all tasks in the system.

A 5-person academic project is fairly easy to coordinate. Much of the time you end up with one person doing most of the work, two people who add some comments/graphics/whatever and two people who do virtually nothing. It's an inefficient approach, but it's easier than trying to get everyone to work up to their potential.

But once you scale that up to thousands and thousands of people, this sort of casual approach to managing the task flow fails utterly. You need people whose entire job is thinking about how the complex dynamic system functions - and ensuring it continues to do so.