Two distinctions, crossed. What comes out is not a ranking and should never be read as one. It is four ways of describing the same situation, different enough that switching between them changes what you see.
The horizontal axis asks what a way of thinking is for. On the left, understanding a situation as it is. On the right, changing it into something preferred. The distinction is Herbert Simon’s.
The vertical axis asks what it attends to. At the top, wholes and the relations between parts. At the bottom, the parts themselves and the steps between them.
The quadrants are not ranked. A team that only ever works top right will make confident changes to things it has not understood. A team that only works bottom left will understand every claim and change nothing.
The most useful comparison is the diagonal. Systems thinking and computational thinking both care about process, one as feedback and one as sequence, and they disagree about almost everything else. Design thinking and critical thinking disagree about whether to propose first or scrutinise first, which is the most common argument in any planning meeting.
Four ways
Laid out as the matrix above, so a card’s position on the page is its position on the two axes. Read across rather than down. The comparison is the method.
Where two meet
Each pair of neighbouring cells has a literature of its own, which is some evidence the axes cut in real places. These are the combinations worth reaching for when one way of thinking has run out. The diagonals have no such literature, and they are where two ways disagree most.
Systems thinking × Design thinking
Design thinking applied to situations too large for any user to see whole. It keeps design’s habit of proposing and testing, and adds systems thinking’s map of where a change will echo. The useful question it asks is where in the system a prototype should be placed so that its effects can be seen.
Jones, P. H. (2014). Systemic design principles for complex social systems. In G. S. Metcalf (Ed.), Social Systems and Design. Springer.
Systems thinking × Critical thinking
Critical thinking pointed at the boundary of a system. Ulrich’s twelve questions ask who a system serves, who decides, what counts as expertise, and who is affected but has no voice. It turns the boundary from a modelling convenience into a claim that can be challenged.
Ulrich, W. (1983). Critical Heuristics of Social Planning. Haupt.
Critical thinking × Computational thinking
Critical thinking pointed at a rule once it is written as a process and run at scale. The questions are the familiar ones: what was measured, what was assumed, who is harmed when the assumption fails. The difference is that the answer is now built into a system that will apply it to thousands of people without asking again.
O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown.
Computational thinking × Design thinking
Building something that runs, in order to find out what you meant. Papert’s constructionism and Resnick’s creative learning spiral both treat the made thing as the place where thinking becomes visible and debuggable. It is design thinking’s prototyping with computational thinking’s demand that the prototype actually work.
Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong Kindergarten. MIT Press.