Our scrum master at work suggested this week that we look into design thinking and systems thinking. I guess there’s some application of both to scrum, though I haven’t done much work on it yet, so I don’t really know what that is. But I like researching stuff and wasting time on the internet, so I did some reading and found some resources. I’ve found two books on design thinking and two books on systems thinking that are often recommended.
For design thinking:
- Change by Design by Tim Brown
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
For systems thinking:
- The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
Full disclosure: I got these recommendations from an AI chatbot. But, in looking into them, they do all seem to be popular choices. (And they’re all real books, and not hallucinations, which is more than I can say for the list I got out of a chatbot when I asked it to recommend some books I could give to a friend for his 65th birthday last week. But I digress.)
I also looked at some LinkedIn Learning videos to try to figure out some basics. My initial takeaway is that I’m not really interested in reading about design thinking right now. I might come back to it later, but systems thinking makes more sense to me at present.
So I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of the two systems thinking books above. I started reading Thinking in Systems today. It might actually be a good book. (Too early to tell, but I’m optimistic.) The author passed away some time ago, but there’s a good website devoted to her work here.
Of course, I’m still in the middle of The Gathering Storm. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The series is really ramping up here, with only two more books to go. So I’m going to try and go back and forth between the two books and see how that goes, but I’m probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wheel of Time rather than the Systems Thinking stuff.