At any moment of the project, systems thinking makes it necessary to keep attention on entrepreneurial opportunities, external project roles, system definition and system realization, works, methods of performing these works, and the team. You will become familiar with the project system diagram as a checklist that links all of these objects to track the status of the project as a whole.

Systems thinking will require you to make the system physical: if the project does not change the physical world, creating or changing some kind of system in it, then you can not do it at all, nothing will change! We will teach you how to understand what exactly is changing in the physical world if you create computer programs, services, documentation, enterprises.

Until the 80s of the last century, systems thinking did not pay attention to the people in the project, but modern systems thinking makes it necessary to think about the external project and internal team roles that people play in the project. The difficulty here is that in systems thinking you need to think not about the people themselves, but about the roles they play: the roles of engineers, managers, entrepreneurs, law enforcement officers, doctors, etc. The course teaches to distinguish a person in projects, his project / activity role, his position, his qualifications / competence.

Systems thinking is equally applicable to engineering (how to think about the product of a project), to management (how to think about an enterprise carrying out a project), to entrepreneurship (how to think about who and where the product of a project can be used).

A system thinker thinks about the whole world as the sets of nested inside each other and interacting at each level. The properties of these nested dolls at each nesting level do not match the properties of the doll in which they are nested. And each level of such a "world doll" (the top matryoshka - the universe, the bottom matryoshka - some quantum superstrings, but most interesting occurs on a small number of medium levels) is served by its community that has figured out how this particular level of matryoshka is arranged. Now if you have such "matryoshka" view of the world, and you are still accustomed to first look at matryoshka which is located in someone else's hands and which is embedded in the doll located in your hands, and only after that you would open your doll-in-hand - then you are a systems thinker. The rest is small details.

To effectively cope with the complexity. Complex tasks become simple, impossible - complex. Yes, it is necessary to get involved in the long history of fundamental education. But then you can build airplanes, instead of making tents out of sticks.

Problems of different scale complexity, from the fundamental ones:
1. Select an object from the background - control attention;
2. To see clear the connection between all levels of generalization and the real world;
3. To realize and be able to use the mechanisms of reasoning, to keep two or more focuses of attention (to understand about people and roles);
4. Update your methods of reasoning as they accumulate in the baggage of mankind knowledge.

Out of the more applied ones:
1. Keep the whole project compactly in mind, not to lose important details (this the standard explanation for students: what they will get as a result of the course);
2. Work at the same speed with more complex projects, and work more quickly with projects of the same complexity due to faster thinking;
3. To negotiate with very different people, an excellent basis for productive communication;
4. To agree with engineers and managers, because it underlies both systems engineering and systems management.

And here is what the students themselves say in the survey of 2018:
1. It is better to do self-diagnostics and plan your professional and personal development;
2. Choose where to begin to act in situations of high uncertainty;
3. Understand how to better organize activities in order to obtain results with a high degree of probability;
4. Expand complex tasks into simple ones in real time;
5. To look at your work and the work of others not from the point of view "How I would do it", but "How to do everything right together".

The habit of mastering thoughtfully complex "tools/mechanisms": it is often inculcated in several years of education in technical fields, sometimes it can be formed in a different way. Other than that, it takes time for independent work and a real problem in your project / external activity, as a good example for training. The rest depends on the desire!

When solving problems not related to joint activities. We also do not recommend immediately trying to use a systems approach for, for example, the idea of reorganizing society.