Can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in China actually create tornados all over the world?
By answering “yes” to this question in 1972, Dr. Edward Lorenza, a research meteorologist, wreaked havoc with some of our basic assumptions about ‘cause and effect’. He raised our awareness that tiny differences in a complex system (such as a butterfly flapping its wings) can produce a large and unanticipated effect, such as changing weather patterns thousands of miles away. While this phenomenon may sound apocryphal [meaning: of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true], research in chaos and complexity sciences seems to be pointing more and more to a world that is interconnected in many ways that we have not begun to understand.
With new technologies and more accessible media, communications that used to take a week, or a month to reach a remote part of the world are now accessible in just seconds with the press of a button.
In the last week of April 1986, as news of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant disaster travelled, the fear and concern became not just Soviet Russia’s but the rest of the world.
As the “Butterfly Effect” demonstrates, our world is more global than ever. A virus first reported in the city of Wuhan in China soon turned into a global pandemic as SARS COVID-19. It took no time to spread all over the world pushing every country into a lockdown for several months. We are yet to recover from this pandemic. {more on this in another article].
No matter where they are growing, our children are influenced by the lives of people everywhere else on the planet. Clearly, they want to understand these interconnections so that they can more effectively work within this web of relationships. Do you know that a corn crop in Iowa, USA affects what a little boy might have to eat in India?
From playground fights to homework burnouts in school, from virus outbreaks to boom-and-bust markets they’ll hear about in later years, our children face all sorts of situations throughout their lives that demand their understanding and problem-solving skills. As parents and educators, we want to help them avoid getting swept up or hurt by these sorts of events. Ideally, we want to be able to see the system that is embedded in, to understand why troubling things happen, and to figure out what they can do about them. As the Butterfly Effect might suggest, we want them to adopt a mindset that they are part of a larger system and that they can ‘make a difference’ even as one individual in the world.
So, how can we help our children grasp these realities and move into adulthood prepared to deal with them? One way to do this is to teach our children to live ‘mindfully’ understanding ‘cause-and-effect’ – how problems come about and how new challenges might unfold in the future. This means questioning, experimenting, and even redesigning systems so that they work better for them.
One way for you can help children to develop these skills is to share ideas and tools from the field of systems thinking. This way of thinking helps us to see how the many social systems in the world around us – from families and neighborhoods to global economies and governments – actually work. It also helps us understand how the cause-and-effect connections among the parts that make up these systems influence the events we experience in our day-to-day lives. In particular, systems thinking helps us see how events can build on each other (for instance, when a play-ground argument between two bullies escalate into an all-out brawl) or control or counteract each other (a child’s effort to improve learning can eventually be counteracted by fatigue and emotional stress). [We will discuss these issues later in another article on Emotional Intelligence.]
A systems view of the world is by no means new. More than 5000 years ago the Upanishads describe reality in terms of whole composed of related parts, emphasizing inter-relationships and circular loops of causality. Systems thinking ideas have been used successfully by physicists, psychologists, business leaders, financial experts, ecologists, and educators around the world with remarkable results.
Adopting a system thinking stance can be an important part of successful parenting and teaching. Through systems thinking examples and stories, we can show our children how to solve, anticipate, or dissolve problems. We can also show them how to address the challenges facing them in their communities and the world. Systems thinking can help a child to understand how the mysterious natural and social worlds function, and even understand the bigger picture of what parents and teachers are trying to accomplish.
Systems thinking is embedded in our old stories, common sense, and wisdom teaching. Yet many basic systems concepts are conspicuously missing from much of education.
Article by W / General, Learning, Learning Approaches, Pedagogy, Teaching & Learning at Walden’s Path, Thinking in Education