Every person has life mastery. Let us determine the place of systems thinking in a person’s life mastery. We will divide life mastery and related knowledge into three parts:
- Mastery of self-development or self-discipline. It is also called mastery of self-control, or an ability to pull oneself together, complete things, and control one’s attention;
- Mastery of thinking or intellect. It is an ability to understand new situations quickly and find ways to solve complex problems. Systems thinking is a part of thinking mastery.
- Applied mastery. This is direct problem solving with a purpose to get a visible result, or a working product.
In particular, systematicity is an important property of self-discipline or self-development mastery, whereas systems approach is an important property of one’s intellect or thinking mastery.
With the help of applied mastery, a problem is directly solved. Let us take, for example, the applied mastery of an accountant. An accountant creates a working product - a balance sheet, and is paid for it. It is an accountant’s applied mastery that an employer pays for. Systems thinking does not substitute applied mastery, but it helps to learn faster and also to choose the necessary applied practices to find ways out of new situations and to solve complex problems.
Each of the three kinds of mastery is backed up by certain knowledge (theories). Applied mastery disciplines are the most understandable for an average person. For example, an accountant’s applied mastery is backed up by accounting discipline. The majority of people are well aware of importance of applied masteries. You can give examples of applied disciplines that earn you a living.
However, in order to apply knowledge to a new situation or a complex problem, intellect, or thinking mastery, should start working. Intellect’s function is to translate an initially unclear and confusing problem into a well-formulated problem, and, subsequently, find a way to solve it. Not even to solve it yet, but just to find and select applied professional knowledge, applicable to solving this problem. Solving a problem is the prerogative of applied mastery.
For intellect development, one should see the next layer - transdiciplines - behind applied knowledge. It is through transdisciplines that intellect develops.
Why? Initially, intellect is given from birth, but it further evolves due to experience in solving complex problems. A person is regularly looking for ways out of new situations and solutions of complex problems by the trial and error method. However, in addition to it one can study transdisciplines to reduce the number of errors and improve the results. All 16 transdiciplines develop human intellect.
All abilities of thinking mastery are in one way or another developed in every person, and these transdiciplines enhance the abilities.