A large number of people have contributed to the development of systems thinking, yet few people—including important leaders—use it to understand the systems in which they live.

I have included below a list of some of those people and I plan to provide more information about the important ones as time goes on.

• Jay Forrester (see below)
• Peter Senge
• W. Edwards Deming
• Buckminster Fuller
• Edward de Bono
• Ernst von Glasersfeld
• Fritjof Capra
• Gregory Bateson
• Humberto Maturana
• Jamshid Gharajedaghi
• Margaret J. Wheatley
• Ragnar Heil
• Robert Fritz

Jay Forrester

Jay Forrester developed System Dynamics, an important contribution to the process of systems thinking.

Jay Wright Forrester (born July 14, 1918-) is a pioneer American computer engineer, systems scientist and was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics, which deals with the simulation of interactions between objects in dynamic systems.

Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Read the rest here.