They talk about the house of the future. The linear thinker draws a floor plan. He details the bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, lounge, etc. He makes sure that each room has adequate light, heating, the correct number of plugs, etc. The design thinker takes a look at the floor plan and lists out what the tenants of the future…

Science geek. Creativity advocate. Curious about the world. I often got in trouble when I was a little girl for wandering off and disappearing for hours. My mother was convinced that I was easily distracted and unable to focus on the simple act of walking home from school. In fact…

If you knew that someone had tried to kill you in the past, would you sit in the same room as them? I am guessing probably not. What if your future and the future of your children depended on it? In the early 1990s, a group of exceptional Colombians met…

This article is part of a series: the A to Z of Systems Thinking. Here is an introduction to the series if you missed it. I had already written the article for letter B — it was going to be about the bath tub analogy (good guess, Olaf!). I was…

I loved Algebra at school. In particular, I loved arithmetic sequences, and practiced them so much that it became easy for me to see a group of numbers and extract a pattern that connected them. It became a game that I played constantly in my head. One day, in Physics…

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you will have noticed that things are not going so well for us humans these days: wars and atrocious conflicts, drastic environmental changes, pandemics and chronic diseases, economic uncertainty, prejudice and inequity… We’re facing many challenges that are complex, unpredictable and interconnected. These…

I’ve been reading about complexity lately. I resisted for a while, put off by certain heated, theatrical debates on LinkedIn. But then one of my wonderful readers challenged me to give complexity theory a chance, and sent me some resources. At roughly the same time, I was talking to amazing…

This article was inspired by some exceptional people I met while exploring multiple perspectives on this question: Why is cancer still such a challenging disease despite tremendous international efforts to treat it? I previously wrote about the topic, and invited readers to contribute their perspectives. I gratefully received close to…

This picture fills me with sadness, yet at the same time, it fills me with hope. It’s a picture of my then two-year-old, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. She insisted on wearing a mask anytime she left the house and diligently kept it on until she got back…