Tag: Systems Thinking

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Blog 3: Systems Thinking in Research: Considering Interrelationships in Research Through Rich Pictures

Stories/Lived Experiences

Authors: Bob Williams, Systems Thinking Practitioner, Trainer and Evaluator – Consultant. Joan O’Donnell, Systems Thinking Trainer and PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisting Living and Learning Institute, Research Funded through the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT)

1st year ADVANCE CRT Student Induction, Cork January 20 A number of people are standing in a circle, one of them is speaking.
1st year ADVANCE CRT Student Induction, Cork January 2023

Let’s start with a true story. It follows on from our last blog about focus and scope. But it highlights our tendency to start with focusing in on the subject of our research–with boundary setting­–rather than considering the wider scope, especially when faced with ‘a problem’ that we hope our research will address. Stating that something is a ‘problem’ is a form of boundary setting, as we will see.

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Blog 2: Getting to the heart of designing research using systems thinking

Stories/Lived Experience

Authors: Bob Williams, Systems Thinking Practitioner, Trainer and Evaluator – Consultant. Joan O’Donnell, Systems Thinking Trainer and PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisting Living and Learning Institute, Research Funded through the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT)

Joan O Donnell Profile Picture and Bob Williams pictured with Monkeys on his head
Joan O Donnell & Bob Williams

In this blog, we will discuss topics covered during ADVANCE CRT’s Summer School on Systems Thinking at Maynooth University in June 2022. See here for the first blog. It can be read as a discourse around designing research, and you are invited to consider how the questions posed offer an inflection point for your research.

Nobody would deny that research is a complex business. One of the most complex decisions is deciding the focus of your research among the vast range of possibilities that lie within its scope. This blog explores how understanding and addressing three different kinds of complexity can help with that tricky decision. Ontological complexity helps you address the reality you are dealing with; cognitive complexity helps you understand how different people make sense of that reality and praxis complexity helps you decide which parts of ontological and cognitive complexities ought to be inside and outside of your focus.

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Blog 1: A feast of new ideas: Systems Thinking in research

Stories/Lived Experiences

Authors: Joan O’Donnell, Systems Thinking Trainer and PhD Researcher at Maynooth University’s Assisting Living and Learning (ALL) Institute, research funded through the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT) and Bob Williams, Systems Thinking Practitioner, Trainer and Evaluator – Consultant

A picture of Joan O'Donnell, wearing green, smiling, in the brightly lit conference room with a closed bar counter in the background with shutters down, at the Glenroyal Hotel Maynooth.
Joan O Donnell

This blog is the first of a series of blogpost contributions outlining basic Systems Thinking concepts presented at the ADVANCE CRT Summer School that we helped to design in June 2022, held in Maynooth.

‘The Systems Thinking summer school opened up little doors in my mind to paths that had been unexplored previously. It’s like an added tool to my repertoire and if I get back into old ways of thinking and get stuck, I remind myself of that door. It makes exploring topics more exciting also because it’s more of an adventure with this way of thinking’. Ashley Sheil, PhD Scholar, Maynooth University.

The ADVANCE CRT Summer School focusing on Systems Thinking marked the largest and most ambitious event of the Science Foundation of Ireland PhD programme to date. It brought over 60 students and supervisors together for four days in a memorable event that was as much a celebration of being together in physical space as an opportunity to delve deeply into the richness that Systems Thinking offers research.

This introductory blog gives an overview of Systems Thinking and a sense of its importance for transdisciplinary research. It also outlines some of the topics that students experienced during that week.

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