Guide on educational needs in Europe and state of the art on the use of Systems Thinking in digital transformation and
in sustainable development
There is a strong awareness that new types of skills are necessary if companies and public organizations are to face successfully the immensely complex and interconnectedsituations that are increasingly being witnessed. Let’s consider as an example the recent Covid-19 pandemic, whose understanding has undergone various interpretations and hasprovided for a lot of confusion in data understanding regarding the number of infected people per day, number of deaths and recoveries, etc., notwithstanding the fact that an epidemichas a typical behaviour over time (which depends on its peculiar aspects).
In other words, making sense of phenomena requires not only the capability to interpret data but to interpret the behaviour of the system underlying the generation of that data. Thismeans that we need to move from just the understanding of symptoms to the capability to understand the root causes, without “guessing” them (as it basically happens with stochasticmethods), but by referring them to a systemic structure. This realization has entered the public limelight and companies/institutions are raising their attention to the need to bridge agap in the amount of people in the organization with such appropriate skills that could in turn also teach/educate/train other employees.
However, these skills are not limited anymore to technicalknowledge but encompass an entire pool of transversal skills that include the ability to think critically, the spirit of initiative, the ability to solve problems in groups, to share a commonvision, to get away from wrong mental models and cognitive biases, the capability to differentiate between an accumulation process and the accumulation itself (i.e.: deficit and publicdebt) etc.: in other words, the capability to think in systems.
Such types of skills may appear abstract and vague, but they are exactly what will be required if we are to face and solve successfully many of the largest issues of the 21st century,and namely: scarcity of resources (i.e.: water, food, oil), economy in crisis, armed conflicts, always more frequent epidemics, climate change, terrorism, poverty, the need to change theway we live, etc. Among these issues, in this project we will apply these skills to two very important aspects needed to change the way we live everyday on this planet: sustainabledevelopment and digital transformation.
More is coming, and soon!
Stay tuned!
