Top 100 Systems Thinkers

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Donella Meadows

Thinking in Systems; leverage points.

system dynamics founder; Industrial/Urban/World Dynamics.

interactive planning; idealized design.

Viable System Model; management cybernetics.

Cybernetics; feedback control.

Law of Requisite Variety; Design for a Brain.

Gregory Bateson

Steps to an Ecology of Mind; double bind.

Heinz von Foerster

second-order cybernetics.

Humberto Maturana

Francisco Varela

autopoiesis; embodied cognition.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

General Systems Theory.

Kenneth Boulding

systems hierarchy; spaceship Earth.

C. West Churchman

systems approach; design of inquiring systems.

Peter Checkland

Soft Systems Methodology.

The Fifth Discipline; learning organizations.

Business Dynamics; flight simulators for management.

Limits to Growth co-author.

2052 forecast; Limits to Growth team.

Scale; allometric scaling laws.

economic complexity index; Why Information Grows.

Ricardo Hausmann

economic complexity / product space.

Albert-László Barabási

scale-free networks; Linked.

small-world networks; Six Degrees.

Steven Strogatz

Sync; coupled oscillators.

networks textbook; community detection.

complex adaptive systems; genetic algorithms.

Murray Gell-Mann

Santa Fe Institute; complex adaptive systems.

Stuart Kauffman

NK fitness landscapes; adjacent possible.

increasing returns; complexity economics.

econophysics; complexity at SFI.

diversity, complex models; The Model Thinker.

Melanie Mitchell

Complexity: A Guided Tour.

multiscale analysis; NECSI.

self-organized criticality.

dissipative structures; far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics.

chaos theory; butterfly effect.

Benoit Mandelbrot

fractals; fat-tailed finance.

Mitchell Waldrop

Complexity (Santa Fe history).

systems ecology; energy flow diagrams.

ecosystem ecology textbook.

C.S. "Buzz" Holling

resilience; adaptive cycle (panarchy).

Lance Gunderson

Panarchy co-author.

resilience thinking.

Frances Westley

social innovation; resilience.

Stockholm Resilience Centre; planetary boundaries.

Johan Rockström

planetary boundaries framework.

Anthropocene science.

Gaia hypothesis.

symbiogenesis; Gaia co-developer.

Buckminster Fuller

synergetics; Spaceship Earth; tensegrity.

Christopher Alexander

A Pattern Language; living structure.

urban systems; Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Systemantics; Gall's Law.

Eberhard Rechtin

systems architecting.

Theory of Constraints; The Goal.

quality systems / Pareto principle in management.

Genichi Taguchi

robust design / loss function.

Safety-II; FRAM.

drift into failure; Field Guide to Human Error.

normal accidents.

Swiss cheese model; latent failures.

STAMP; Engineering a Safer World.

Eliyahu Goldratt

Critical Chain (in addition to TOC).

Vincent Barabba

Decision Support; enterprise systems.

warm data; symmathesy.

Web of Life; systems view of life.

Pier Luigi Luisi

autopoiesis-life synthesis.

pace layering; How Buildings Learn.

Dreams of Reason; complexity popularizer.

Complex Adaptive Systems (with Page).

agent-based modeling; Generative Social Science.

Evolution of Cooperation; tit-for-tat.

Thomas Schelling

segregation models; micromotives/macrobehavior.

Sugarscape; firm-size distributions.

Leigh Tesfatsion

Agent-based Computational Economics.

strategy dynamics; resource accumulation.

George Richardson

Feedback Thought; system dynamics history.

Stella software; systems thinking pedagogy.

David Peter Stroh

Systems Thinking for Social Change.

Human Systems Dynamics; CDE model.

Cynefin framework.

complexity practitioner; Cynefin community.

complexity leadership theory.

complexity leadership theory.

Margaret Wheatley

Leadership and the New Science.

Theory U; presencing.

epidemic systems modeling.

infectious disease modeling (Imperial).

Vittoria Colizza

network epidemiology.

Manuel Castells

network society / space of flows.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital; surge cycles.

Mark Granovetter

strength of weak ties; embeddedness.

Nicholas Christakis

social-network contagion; Connected.

social physics; reality-mining feedback systems.

Alicia Juarrero

Dynamics in Action; constraints and complex causality.

Samuel Arbesman

Half-Life of Facts; Overcomplicated systems.

Tragedy of the Commons; commons-as-system framework.

Sander van der Leeuw

ASU; long-term socio-environmental systems / sustainability

John D. Sterman

MIT; Business Dynamics — system-dynamics modeling for managers