Tools for Thinking
Solving intellectual tasks is like doing manual work: You need the right tools. Fortunately, there is already a well-stocked toolbox of established and proven thinking methods that you can use. We would like to introduce our readers to some of the methods we like to use.
General systems theory is a particularly powerful tool. Its concepts and approaches can be applied universally because almost everything can be understood as a system. However, general systems theory is not a closed and generally accepted body of theory, but rather a loose collection. We are therefore attempting here to bring order and structure to it and to add missing parts.
In addition, Stephan Witt and Werner Ahrendt have developed their own approach for analyzing practically any system. We call this heuristic the method of ontogenetic thinking. We present this method of thinking and demonstrate its practical application.
Traditional Advice
Considerations and the resulting theories should be free of contradictions, consistent and coherent, i.e. the individual steps of thought should build on each other logically and be comprehensible. To achieve this goal, thinkers from different eras have given good advice. And to come up with new ideas, you also need a dose of creativity. For this too, there are tried and proven methods.
General Systems Theory
Both the philosophers of antiquity and modern scientists have noticed that there are striking similarities between a wide variety of complex systems - whether they are biological organisms, human languages or economic life. In the 20th century, scientists such as the biologists Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972), Humberto Maturana (1928-2021) and Francisco Varela (1946-2001), the mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the computer scientist Jay Wright Forrester (1918-2016) and physicists such as Erich Jantzsch (1919-1980), Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) and Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) set out to create universally valid theories to describe complex systems. These ideas became known under names such as "general systems theory", "cybernetics", and "chaos theory".
Ontogenetic Thinking
Ontogenetics is a new method and approach for systematically analyzing systems. It is more comprehensive than standard system analysis and particularly designed to explore multi-level systems which are constituted from a multitude of individually acting elements combining dynamic behaviors and dynamic structures.
