Comparing Experts' Systems Thinking Skill Across Contexts

This study is an attempt to analyse experts' notion of systems thinking in different contexts. Seven experts were asked questions to probe their systems thinking skills across three different levels of familiarity. The first level investigated the experts' approach to problem-solving in their own domains. The next level of familiarity aimed at understanding how experts think of problem-solving in real-life contexts. The third level of familiarity aimed at finding out how they would solve a problem in a novel scenario that is unrelated to their field of research or experience. Qualitative analysis of the interviews revealed that the experts demonstrated a high level of system thinking in the question related to their field. In the two subsequent levels, real-life scenarios and a novel scenario, the experts' system thinking skills decreased progressively. We discuss the results in the context of transfer and through multiple systems thinking taxonomic frameworks that are found in the literature.