alt Hacker NewsIt's always valuable to have a generalizable skill. But design is fundamentally a craft; an applied art. It's problem-solving. And like any craft, there are tools and techniques that are tried and true. You could approach woodworking with a ground-up Systems Thinking approach, but would you turn down the advice of a carpenter with 30 years of experience? Technically all you need to understand woodworking is a physics textbook and maybe an organic chemistry textbook.
My guess is you're a software developer (as I am), and in my opinion the fatal flaw of our group is the incorrect belief that we could do anything or solve any problem by simply decomposing it into smaller and smaller components. The thing is, for a big enough problem, there are an almost infinite number of ways to break it down and then build it back up. In optimization terms, complex projects are highly nonlinear problems, so you may be able to understand what the inputs are, but it sometimes takes wisdom and experience to tune the parameters.
Around ten years ago, I was a designer for some 20 years. A strange path led me to a different place which is intermixed or adjacent to the field of organisational theory.
At that time, I decomposed problems too, maybe a bit differently than a developer, I can’t really know. I still decompose, except that the difference to the past is that analysis only makes up one part of the larger whole. I knew many designers which never did either.
I agree with you that there are some areas which do not need theory. That depends on where you define the system boundaries. In the example of a carpenter: Yes, 30 years, the person indeed knows that stuff. One of first question of Systems Thinking, however, would be: What’s the reference system, is his company viable in the future? I very much believe that if you apply this to complex projects, to ‘communication and control’ of an enterprise, that one should know the backstory.
The reductionist approach got us to the problems, applying reductionism to a theory trying to solve reductionism is courageous. In my opinion, the method which is used to teach must incorporate the principle which it is trying to convey. An alternative worldview needs to have a starting point somewhere, and I like to think it starts with the education, which is not to say that I do not understand the urge to speed up absorption of the theory.