[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# Systems Thinking seems to be important, but how does it work?

## Details

**Authors** Prill, Patrick

**Year** 2025

**Publisher** Test Pappy (testpappy.wordpress.com)

**Kind of work** blog

**Discipline** Computer Science & AI

**Secondary disciplines** Systems Science

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://testpappy.wordpress.com/2025/03/12/systems-thinking-seems-to-be-important-but-how-does-it-work/)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To answer, for a software testing audience, what systems thinking actually consists of in practice, starting from the author's position that systems thinking is basically thinking and that frameworks exist to give it structure.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

One teaching episode: the author taught DSRP to his daughter by analyzing the kitchen door.

### How they did it (methods)

A blog post in five moves: an opening on mental models, quoting the Cabreras' definition of a mental model as information combined with organization, which he flags as recalled from memory; his own background with Donella Meadows, the Cabrera Lab podcast, Ruth Malan's Systems Seeing Adventure, and a failed 2013 attempt to use mind maps as virtual test models; a section called Doing Systems Thinking with four categories, each given guiding questions and an example from the kitchen-door exercise; and a close.

### What they found (results)

The author concludes that no single framework is the correct one, that any approach works if it helps you analyze a system and organize what you learn, and that practice is what improves it. He states that the four categories apply to any system, from whole countries to an animal, a piece of software or a bicycle.

## Commentary

### In short

A software tester's account of learning systems thinking, which teaches DSRP by applying it to a kitchen door with his daughter and renames the four patterns in testing vocabulary.

### In more detail

Prill writes for testers who have heard that systems thinking matters and want to know what doing it looks like. He credits the Cabreras alongside Donella Meadows and Ruth Malan, opens with their definition of a mental model as information combined with organization, and says plainly that he is quoting from memory. The body of the post is four categories, each a renaming of a DSRP pattern in language a tester will recognize: Boundaries and Distinctions, Elements and Parts and Whole, Connections and Relations and Actions, and Actors and Motivations and Perspectives. Each category gets guiding questions and then the same running example, a kitchen door he analyzed with his daughter while teaching her the approach. Deciding the boundary meant including the door frame but excluding how the frame mounts into the wall, because the moving door was the object of interest. Elements meant the leaf, the lock, the handle and the hinges, with the frame simultaneously a part of the wall. Relations meant tracing that pushing the handle retracts the latch bolt while the deadbolt answers only to the key. Perspectives meant the installer, the buyer, the user, and the handle itself, each making different details relevant. He also recounts an earlier failure: in 2013 he built mind maps as virtual test models, which worked until he added relationships and the diagrams became unreadable, which he reads as evidence that the system was too complex for the tool. The post makes no claim that DSRP is the right framework, only that having one and practicing it is what matters.

### Response

The strongest thing in the post is the kitchen door. Prill works all four operators on an object nobody would call a system, including taking the handle's perspective, which is the non-anthropocentric reading of point-view that most practitioner accounts quietly drop in favor of stakeholder analysis. His boundary decision is also the distinction rule used correctly: including the frame and excluding its mounting is a choice made from a purpose, and he says what the purpose was. Where the restatement loses something is in the framing. He presents the four as categories for organizing information gained about a system, which turns operators into folders; the structural claim is that each pattern is a co-implied pair, so that drawing a boundary around the door creates the not-door in the same stroke, and a category scheme has no way to carry that. His mind-map story is the clearest illustration of what the pair-structure buys and he does not connect it: the diagrams became unreadable when he added relationships because he had no way to distinguish levels, which is part-whole, and no way to fix a vantage, which is point-view.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

**Added** 2026-10-14

**How to cite this** Prill, Patrick (2025). Systems Thinking seems to be important, but how does it work?. Test Pappy (testpappy.wordpress.com).