Systems thinking

Welcome to the 93rd episode of our Crossing Thin Ice podcast series, where twice a month we tackle risk management topics.

I'm Max Rudolph, and today my partner Dave Ingram and I will share two thinking approaches, first principles and systems thinking.

Each can provide a game plan that presents a solution in ways that can be defended, and a diverse team that considers more than one approach can create better modeling solutions.

As a reminder, nothing in today's podcast is intended to be investment advice.

Using rules of thumb means you act as others in the herd do.

while first principles thinking incorporates contrarian views and the likelihood of their accuracy.

This bottom-up thinking forces the modeler to consider updating both the model structure and assumptions about trend and statistical distributions on a regular basis, transitioning into systems thinking.

First principles thinking is probably the ultimate in what is called reductionist thinking.

I've gained a little bit of wisdom over the years.

Well, Eric, now, if we ground the topic a little and define certain terms that we are going to be discussing today at length, systems thinking and AI are two massive buzzwords at the moment.

From your days monitoring nuclear reactors to running enterprise IT, how do you define a system when AI agents are constantly modifying code, workflows, and data in real time?

I mean, a system is a system.

just holding space for people to be able to process what's going on what needs to happen next how they need to show up as leaders that feels like the work of our time

yeah for sure for sure um and and because it's because it's so of the time is because we are facing such complex challenges and such um you know really severe challenges at multiple levels and that can feel really overwhelming I've come across this idea of the window of tolerance when it comes to systems thinking where, you know, sometimes you're kind of OK with it and you can sit with it and you can you can be with it.

But other times it just gets too much, you know.

And so for me, when it's too much, I kind of go into hypo arousal where I kind of shut down and I just kind of feel frozen.

And so I think that's how we also... hope to, you know, amplify any move that we make and how many multiple ways can it affect the community that we're working with.

Have you also been maybe equally systems thinking about the nature of your own practice internally, right? So I would imagine that that set of experiences in the world, thinking structurally, systemically about the kind of systemic change required upstream of delivering architectural services or works of architecture or landscape, are there ways in which the structure of mass beyond simply being not for profit is equally kind of systems thinking.

I can mention one thing that might be true.

You can tell me if I have this right, that in my experience, mass is radically distributed, widely distributed.

And this was, you know, 08, 09, again, what is that? 16, 17 years.

This is well before we all had Zoom.

So are there ways in which either that distributed model or other aspects of mass experience benefit from that kind of systems thinking as well?

I think as we... determine what it is that we're going to do next.