(MIT News: Cambridge, MA) -- Whatever your profession, systems thinking is critical for success in the global economy, according to speakers at the 2011 MIT SDM Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges.

The annual event, sponsored by MIT’s System Design and Management (SDM) program, drew almost 300 attendees from across MIT and around the world on Oct. 24 and 25, 2011. This year’s conference, which highlighted SDM’s 15th anniversary and featured several SDM alumni speakers who are now senior executives, focused on addressing complexity and innovation in health care, education, and product development.

Speaking live from Moscow via remote video conferencing, keynote presenter and SDM co-founder Edward Crawley, first defined systems to give attendees a common understanding of the term. “A system is a set of interrelated entities that perform a function,” said Crawley, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The function that emerges, he said, is greater than what could come from any single entity—and the overall system’s “emergent properties” are what produce value.

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