Mapping a Business System

Mapping a Business System

Susan Salinas

Kaplan University

Mapping a Business System

Systems thinking is an important process for the growth and development of any organization. It allows an organization to analyze current issues and improve upon those issues by putting new factors into play. It can also lead to the prediction of an organization's future. The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of mapping a business system through systems thinking. It will also provide an example of an organization that would benefit from using systems thinking, along with the purpose, the components and recommended changes.

In his description, Hutchens (2001) felt “systems thinking provides a whole new way of seeing that helps us understand the complete patterns of cause and effect in our world. It’s a way of recognizing how things, people, and events connect to each other” (p. 59). “Systems thinking is both a world view and a process; it can be used for both the development and understanding of a system and for the approach used to solve a problem” (Edson, 2008, p. 5). In a way, it is an approach to predict the future of organizations wisely. Peter Senge first talked about systems thinking in his book, The Fifth Discipline, as being part of organizational development. According to Leon (2007) he “promoted systems thinking as the main capability to attain fundamental solutions to the problems of all kinds of organizations, as well as to design strategies that facilitate the creation of the futures desired by a group of people, instead of resorting to quick fixes and other traps that present and inhibit organizational intelligence” (p. 15).

A systems thinker’s objective is to understand the forces of business in relation to a desired future with anticipated learning during the process. A lack of learning from past objectives leads to repeating the current state of the problem again. According to Edson (2008), “systems thinking provides a way of looking...