Petroleum Geoscience Consultancy and Training

Systems Thinking – Causal Links

As scientists, we spend too much time deconstructing and analysing.  We soon become isolated specialists, working in our silos, working on our own bit of the big picture.  We lose sight of the connections and causal links between the elements of the system.  Imagine a body with well described and documented organs but no nerves or blood vessels connecting them up . . .  it dies.

The connections are just as important as the things they connect.  This is a fundamental aspect of systems thinking and another core part of the Geolumina Philosophy.  Often we don’t need more detail to answer the problem, we just need to better understand the causal links between the parts of the system.

 

Geolumina
Similar posts
  • Story Telling ... — One of the key elements of the Geolumina approach will be story telling.  We tell “stories” in geoscience all the time, for example, basin (hi)story, depositional (hi)story, burial (hi)story, diagenetic (hi)story and many more. Like any good story we need good, well defined characters, a good story line and a happy ending!  This is yet another skill that [...]
  • Teach to Learn — The best way to test your thinking and find out if your ideas are organised in your mind  is to teach.  You cannot stand in front of a group of people and tell them something if it is not clear in your mind! You don’t have to volunteer to run training courses, it could be [...]
  • Less is More R... — When we are faced with a geoscientific problem, we typically bring in the experts to collect more data and look in more and more detail.  But so often, so much detail is established that we can no longer see the big picture.  More often than not we need to step back, remove several layers of [...]
  • Learn to Learn — Seems obvious doesn’t it?  However, few of us have been taught “how to learn”.  In school you either knew and passed your exams, or you didn’t, and you failed! An important part of the Geolumina philosophy is to ensure we consider how we learn and develop the skill.  This will be the most important skill [...]
  • How to Think, Not... — Geoscience education and training, like most education, focuses on teaching what to think, not how to think.  Learning what to think only arms you to solve specific problems, but learning fundamental principles and concepts and how to use them enables us to solve unlimited problems. After years of experience teaching and learning in the petroleum [...]