Challenge Day #10

When a Butterfly Sneezes: A Guide for Helping Kids Explore Interconnections in Our World Through Favorite Stories by Linda Booth Sweeney

Like many books that have influenced me, this one is meant to teach.  According to Dawna Markove in the forward to the book, Booth Sweeney sets out to answer the question, “How do we teach children to think for themselves, to think with open minds, to think in such a way that they take responsibility for their own lives?” This is a question I have encouraged and tried to answer with each interaction I’ve had with a child in my 40 + years in education.

The book is about shifting from linear cause and effect style thinking to thinking about interconnectedness and feedback loops which are at the heart of systems thinking.  I love that the author provides a list of children’s literature to assist in teaching each of the following concepts:

• Simple interconnectedness
• Circular feedback
• The horizons and delays
• Unintended consequences
• Exponential growth
• Escalation
• Levels of perspective
• Nested systems
• Structure drives behavior
• Limits to success
• Fixes that fail
• Shifting the burden

When I struggle to explain systems thinking I find myself turning to this book because I believe that systems thinking will help shift the world and I also believe children’s literature is a powerful teaching tool.  I have always been a teacher who is able to take complex concepts and bring them to the level of teaching them to young children to distill things down to their essence.  The paradox in schools is that children are natural systems thinkers and education attempts to force students to think more linear. 

In Part I of the book Booth Sweeney shares, “One of the most profound and practical habits I’ve learned from systems thinking is to consciously look at a system from multiple perspectives—actually, from multiple levels of perspective.” I like the fit this idea has to Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) and how I approach looking at life’s challenges.

In the book she uses four different levels of perception, but in PCT we look at eleven.  Her four levels are in alignment to the eleven in PCT but easier for most folks to differentiate.  She talks about events, then patterns, then structures, then mental models.  At its core this idea of going up levels can be captured in asking, “Why?” repeatedly.  Going down levels is about asking “How?”

In Part II there are tips for sharing system thinking concepts with children:

1. Begin with what happened
2. Trace cause-and-effect relationships
3. Introduce the language of causality
4. Ask causal questions
5. Encourage kids to create their own stories
6. Help children show what they already know
7. Choosing stories

In Part III is a lesson for each of the children’s books. Booth Sweeney shares two books I have used several times with adults in helping them to better understand systems thinking - The Old Ladies Who Like Cats by Carol Greene, and Zoom by Istvan Banyai. At the core of PCT is understanding systems which is often not an easy shift for adults.

Becoming a systems thinker has served me by helping me look deeply into a problem to approach it from different levels of perception and to seek an understanding of the interconnectedness of all the world.  Once we understand the web of life we become more globally aware and understand how each of us is in relationship with others and the world around us – in ways that may not be apparent without deep systems thinking.