Let’s call this property of passing some threshold of understanding, after which it is difficult to remember difficulties, metanoia. The word comes from religious practices and means a “change of mind”, a complete break between past and current thinking. You study in some seminary, and it seems that your thinking is not as set up as the priests expect of you. Then suddenly, at some point, you click, and you show everyone that you have the same thinking as a priest, from that moment on you are “real” not pretending. Here is the word—metanoia, such a small Western version of enlightenment. The word “metanoia” was recommended to be used in place of the word “learning” by systems management guru Peter Senge, because for the word “learning” from his point of view is already too widespread and does not imply a radical change in the way of thinking as a result of learning. We don’t like the religious connotations of metanoia, but the phenomenon of “forgetting the difficulties of learning” is good enough.
When metanoia has passed, in his new state of thinking, with “new rails in his brain”, it is completely incomprehensible to the person what the problem was before, "with the old rails of thought. Let’s imagine: I know that the Earth is flat, I argue for a long time that there is no way the Earth can be round, but at some point I am convinced of this. And every time, in my projects, I first automatically act as if the Earth were flat, then I remember with an effort of will that rationally it should be round, and then I do it as a reflex, and I see a thousand pieces of evidence of the roundness of the Earth. And at this point I can no longer understand why I thought the Earth was flat. Rationally, I can remember that I once thought the Earth was flat. But I can no longer understand how I went from knowing “intuitive theory” to possessing "counterintuitive theory. And so I can’t comprehend the learning activities that are necessary for me to achieve this metanoia of the roundness of the Earth in my students. But the very fact of paying attention to this past metanoia gives you a chance to figure it out. The work of putting together the right exercises to produce such metanoia in students is hard work, but it is possible. Creating an adequate training course on already existing theory may well take a couple decades, and if in addition to the exercises themselves it is necessary to create a new theory, even hundreds of years, as it was in the transition from the Ptolemaic to Copernican understanding of planetary motion. All this reasoning about the difficulty of creating a theory and a course of study also applies in full measure to systems thinking.
Special attention should be paid to the fact that in case of metanoia we are talking about teaching not any practices, but “counterintuitive” ones, which the brain resists especially, for cases when it “intuitively knows” how it should be, and actively resists new knowledge! It is much easier to teach something new, but if you have already picked up “the people’s intuition” somewhere, it will be very difficult to teach you something more effectively new: you will have to undergo metanoia, and that requires a somehow documented model of purposeful thinking, a sequence of exercises organized in a course, time to go through these exercises, as well as great self connectedness—because all the intuition of the students will show that some kind of madness is taught! The chances of passing this metanoia for a “self-taught” is almost impossible unless you are a genius.
At school they taught you to jump over the bar you run up and jump. But if you have to jump very high, then after the run-up you have to turn your back to the bar and jump back up (Fosbury Flop, an invention of 1968).
It’s totally counterintuitive, but it gives you the ability to fly over a two-meter bar. It takes a tremendous amount of trust in your coach to get you to start practicing such a jump—for at this point it seems that lots and lots of practice will give you the opportunity to overcome additional tens of centimeters with “basic jumps” which is not true at all. And then there will be metanoia: you will not understand why people are still jumping over the bar somewhere other than with the Dick Fosbury technique-even though you no longer remember that it was Dick Fosbury who started it, and that people started jumping like this only a year earlier than they landed on the moon in 1969. And it’s about what people were doing for thousands of years: high jumping!
There are the same counterintuitive ways of thinking that allow you to think according to the Olympic motto: “faster, higher, stronger”. System thinking is the same set of specific counterintuitive techniques invented by different people, which allow thinking to be more effective than its previous, “folk” variants. In particular, systems thinking is, first of all, an effective way to control attention in a project; it allows you to emphasize objects in a project that are worthy of additional attention.
The main metanoia of systems thinking is that you begin to think of the world as consisting of systems nested in each other in a part-whole relationship and interacting with each other. If you understand a system not as “any object we consider”, but as “a system from a systems approach”, it turns out to be extremely counterintuitive, so it requires special training and subsequent long training of such systems thinking. Thus, “intuitively” when trying to talk about something (for example, about soup or about a computer) people tell first of all about the parts of the discussed object (the composition of soup, the composition of a computer). In systems thinking it is vice versa: the object-system under discussion is declared a part at once, and a story is told first of all about its environment (a dinner situation in the case of soup and a computer use situation in case of computer, so soup and computer will be only parts of their use situations). And only after figuring out the system environment (what surrounds the soup during lunch, what surrounds the computer during its use), after “looking outward from the system” will the system thinker be interested in “looking inward”, the parts of the system. This is very, very counterintuitive!
In mathematics , the intuitive is often substituted for the term “trivial” is the possibility of repetition by “anyone” in a given community, and non-triviality is the impossibility of repetition (thanks to mathematician Roman Mikhailov for discussing this issue). Demonstrating the interesting non-trivial makes it trivial after a couple of rounds of training for those interested, for the definition of “intuitiveness/triviality” and “counterintuitive/non-trivial” implicitly enters the “right now” moment in time. Any “counterintuitive/non-trivial” of one generation becomes “intuitive/trivial” for another generation of thinkers. This “triviality” could well be added to the list of synonyms for "intuitiveness.
Who knows, maybe today’s systems thinking for future generations of people and thinking machines will be “folk”, “intuitive”, “trivial”. But for now, systems thinking is highly counterintuitive and difficult to master.
We are using the non-common meaning of the word “intuitiveness” here. By “intuitiveness” in everyday life often means not the result of rational logical reasoning, but the use of “flair”—getting the result of reasoning by insight, inspiration, illumination, and this result can be quite non-trivial. We say about such results of thinking that they are “counterintuitive”, i.e. they are nontrivial, unreproducible to different people; these results do not belong to “common knowledge”, popular thinking automatisms, typical intuition of surrounding people, and our own intuition.
*An excerpt from Systems Thinking course.