Mapping situations and interactions: reflections on a professional lifetime of systems thinking in practice

Systems thinking and systems practice is very personal. The whole essence of systems thinking is to acknowledge our own values and assumptions about a chosen situation of interest as we try to understand it better and how we might intervene to make some change, hopefully for the better. My professional life as an academic has encompassed a wide range of situations of interest dealing with education and/or environmental matters and using several techniques or approaches, in particular diagramming. This paper outlines a biography of one systems practitioner, or how systems thinking has influenced my teaching, researching, and engaging practice.