A wooden bowl in a museum. You see the wood that's left. Not the tree, not the failed attempts, not the hands that shaped it. Systems thinking is about seeing what you don't see.
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What the Archaeologist Didn’t Find, or Systems Thinking and the Art of Seeing What’s Missing
I recently learned something about archaeology that opened my eyes. Mostly because I somehow missed this, while it's clearly sitting in front of me. There's a whole discipline around examining ancient waste dumps. Middens, they call them. Mountains of discarded shells, broken pottery, animal bones. And it hit me: most of what archaeologists dig up is stuff people threw away or left behind.