From Event Thinking to Systems Thinking

Daniel Kim, a foundational figure in the systems-thinking community, uses a manager assigned to "get to the bottom" of five late product launches to illustrate the shift from event thinking to systems thinking. He introduces the "iceberg" model — events at the surface, patterns of behaviour beneath, systemic structures beneath those, and mental models at the bottom — and argues that nearly all durable improvement happens at the deeper layers, while almost all organisational attention is spent reacting to the events on top.