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

# Systems Thinking Examples: From Power Grids to Hospitals

## Details

**Authors** Cardin, Michel-Alexandre and Ramirez, Arancha

**Year** 2025

**Publisher** Strategic Engineering Consulting (strategic-engineering.co)

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Engineering

**Secondary disciplines** Systems Science, Business & Management

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://strategic-engineering.co/concepts/systems-thinking)

## In authors' words

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

To explain systems thinking to engineering leaders and cross-functional teams, and to show where it applies in engineering practice and in everyday work.

### How they did it (methods)

A reference article structured as definition, focus, key characteristics, benefits, timing, starting points, a tools table, worked examples, sources, and FAQs. The key-characteristics section divides the subject in two. Six core concepts describe how a system behaves — purpose, interconnections, feedback, stocks and flows, non-linearity, emergence — cited to Meadows (2008). A second subsection, "The 4 Patterns (DSRP)," describes how people think about a system, cited to Cabrera and Cabrera (2022), and names distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives. The tools table and the three examples — emergency-department crowding, supply-chain dual sourcing, and an education iceberg analysis — draw on the behavior-side concepts only. The FAQ repeats the four pattern names. Cabrera and Cabrera (2022) appears in the five-item source list with its full Systems 10(2), 26 citation.

### What they found (results)

The article claims that systems thinking "rests on six core concepts, which describe how a system behaves, and four patterns, which describe how people think about a system," and that Cabrera and Cabrera describe four patterns that "organise information into meaning." It asserts that mastering DSRP "sharpens analysis in classrooms and boardrooms alike."

## Commentary

### In short

A reference article on systems thinking for engineering leaders that splits the subject in two: six concepts describing how systems behave, and DSRP describing how people think about them. It names the four patterns and cites the Cabreras' 2022 primer, but does not explain the patterns or use them anywhere in its tools or examples.

### Response

The division of labor the article draws is the right one, and it is the division DSRP itself insists on: Meadows's concepts describe how a system behaves, and the four patterns describe how the information about it is organized by the observer. Placing DSRP on the cognition side, and crediting it with organizing information into meaning, states the theory's claim accurately in a sentence. What follows does not build on it. The four patterns are named and never unpacked, so a reader cannot perform one; the tools table, the starting-point advice, and all three examples are behavior-side throughout, leaving the DSRP half of the framework doing no work in the article that announces it. The claim that mastering DSRP "sharpens analysis in classrooms and boardrooms alike" is asserted without a citation, in an article that cites Meadows for stocks and flows — and it is a claim with a measurement literature behind it that the article's own source, the 2022 primer, would have led to. The result is an accurate placement of DSRP in a systems-thinking curriculum that stops at the placement.

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

**Added** 2026-10-28

**How to cite this** Cardin, Michel-Alexandre and Ramirez, Arancha (2025). Systems Thinking Examples: From Power Grids to Hospitals. Strategic Engineering Consulting (strategic-engineering.co).