Abstract
The main focus of the what question of systemic thinking is on the articulation and organization of the objectives of the problem that we are trying to gain increased understanding of. Given that a mess is a system of problems as we described it in Chap. 2, we take the occasion in this chapter to dissect a given problem into its basic elements in order to gain further insight regarding its parent mess. This chapter builds on the stakeholder analysis undertaken in the previous chapter. The chapter begins by discussing the anatomy of a problem. Then, the importance of objectives is discussed. Next, we address objective articulation. We then distinguish between fundamental and means objectives and discuss how to organize them to increase our understanding. Finally, a framework for addressing the what question is presented and this framework is demonstrated on the real estate problem introduced in Chap. 6.
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Hester, P.T., Adams, K.M. (2017). The What of Systemic Thinking. In: Systemic Decision Making. Topics in Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54672-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54672-8_7
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