Dialectical Systems Thinking for Problem Solving and Decision Making

Dialectical Systems Thinking for Problem Solving and Decision Making

Problems can occur to any person at any time nd in any place. Unfortunately, our present educational and training system mainly prepares specialists. As a result o that, these specialists having such narrow thinking may successfully solve their specialized problems but may not know how to solve other problems. Life will be happy if all problems in general can be solved well. In the opposite case life will be "the sea of torments". The author of this paper argues that the kind of thinking we need for problem solving and decision making in any case should rely on the most generalized knowledge, isomorphic, similar or analogical properties and conclusions that are applicable to all or almost all areas of practice. In other words, this paper presents the kind of thinking based on dialectical laws the results of systems research and some important concepts derived from different sciences such as informatics, cybernetics… This kind of thinking has been realized in TRIZ and has recently extended its applications to other nonengineering fields. In this paper, the author shares some of his experience in teaching this kind of thinking at the Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity (CSTC) belonging to Vietnam National University - HoChiMinh City.