Systems explained: Diagramming

Lecturer
These diagrams show you not just the ideas but the way they're interlinked.  For example, the connections between the type of technology involved and the company’s ability to respond, and it shows you in particular that that idea of the company’s ability to respond has become a central focus, that is where the connections home together, and in a way that’s given you a clue as to what’s important about this issue and what you might have to respond to in future.  And that’s the point: when you're drawing these diagrams, they're diagrams of systems, and systems, we use that word when things are very connected, very complicated, very interlinked, and this technique is a way of seeing how things interlink.  And it’s very difficult to do that in a written text because writing is sequential, you have one sentence after the other, and it’s very hard to see what the links are when you're writing.

So if you want to understand systems, think about systems and work with systems, which is what this course is about, you'll need to draw diagrams, and it’s a crucial tool in the whole of the course.