Introduction to Systems Thinking

Tuesday, October 26, 2004: meeting 17

Where?

Hosted by Nayima and Tryx.

The meeting will be in the -Blue Room- in the Lunatic, Martelarenplein in Leuven

When?

Doors at 19:00.
Meeting starts at 20:00.
There will be something to eat.

What ?

  1. Who is who: a quick round
  2. Topic: Systems Thinking: Willem van den Ende (Living Software) and Marc Evers (NIWI-KNAW), 2 experienced agile software development coaches, come from the Netherlands to give an introduction on this subject:
We will introduce Systems Thinking through a fun ballgame, and then facilitate you in applying the Causal Loop diagram technique to your own project situation. A brief introduction:

  • Have you noticed that changing your software development method changes your organisation?
  • Wondered why the customer can't keep up with the programming team?
  • What to do about it?
  • How to get a team to use unit testing?
  • Doubted whether the lack of unit testing is really the team's biggest problem?
We found systems thinking to be a simple but powerful technique for finding answers to questions like these. When seeing organisations, projects, and teams as systems consisting of interrelated and interacting parts, one enables a relaxed focus on relationships as well as the whole and can easily reveal self-reinforcing feedback loops and not-so-obvious causal relations before they trip us up.

You can find more information on http://www.systemsthinking.net

I've written a blog entry about this night further investigating the relations between XP and Systemsthinking .

Who?

(Use the "Edit" button at the bottom of this page and add your name and company to the list.)

  1. VeraPeeters, Tryx
  2. WillemVanDenEnde, Living Software
  3. MarcEvers, NIWI-KNAW
  4. PascalVanCauwenberghe
  5. SvenGorts
  6. BernardVanderBeken
  7. JohanPeeters
  8. DavidGrietens
  9. BrunoPeeters
  10. FrankRenaers
  11. WouterBilliau
  12. SvenClarysse, Egova/Cronos
  13. MarkoVanDerPuil, ZeelandNet
  14. JanBakker, ZeelandNet
  15. PhilippeDeBruycker?, BZ
Related pages: XpBeMeeting