In the first episode of Season 2 of the AgriCurious podcast,Dennis Baffour-Awuah spoke with Dr. Kevan Lamm, an Extension Leadership specialist and Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication, about systems thinking and the Systems Thinking for Educational Problem Solving (STEPS) project. The Lamm lab is a proud partner on the STEPS project and is excited to “gamify” learning by incorporating hypothetical case scenarios into the classroom to encourage systems thinking.
Dr. Lamm explained that systems thinking differs from traditional thinking paradigms, which often assume there is a single right answer and that solutions come from tracking linear cause-and-effect relationships. He described systems thinking as a set of skills, techniques, and tools that help us see the whole of a picture. It involves recognizing delayed reactions and complex causality, emphasizing circular relationships rather than strictly linear ones.
“It is looking at not necessarily the direct effects, but indirect effects or unintended consequences. It’s really the entire picture, as opposed to a specific event,” he said.
Drawing from his experience raising livestock for fairs as a young boy, Dr. Lamm explained how even a simple thank-you note could influence relationships and results the next year. In agriculture, he noted, systems thinking helps practitioners step back and look at the entire value chain, making it easier to understand how different parts are connected, even if they initially seem unrelated.
Speaking about the STEPS project he leads, Dr. Lamm explained that it aims to bring systems thinking into the undergraduate agricultural classroom. He mentioned that the main idea of the project is to introduce students to nine primary systems archetypes (repeating patterns commonly seen in complex systems) and to provide resources that help students debrief, better understand, and engage in discussions about these concepts, all grounded in real-life observations. He noted that the team has developed hypothetical case scenarios packaged as reusable learning objects, (HCS-RLOs), which can be easily integrated into any undergraduate classroom. For example, a communications professor running a marketing campaign can use a communication-focused HCS-RLO to highlight the parallels and trade-offs involved in over- or under-communication, as well as their potential outcomes when engaging the public. These scenarios assist students in understanding how such dynamics occur in the real world, which is a key goal of the RLOs.
“So students get a chance to practice in a sandbox environment, a place to play and learn with very little real world consequence but hopefully we are embedding in these techniques, tools, skills and thought processes, so that when they are encountering them in the real world or when they are seeing a situation that just doesn’t add up from a cause and effect perspective, they can draw upon the systems thinking language and tool set that they’ve developed and hopefully have a little bit more of a nuanced way of thinking about solutions,” he explained.
He added that although the program is agricultural and food systems-oriented, it is open not only to agricultural students but also to students from other disciplines, thereby giving everyone the opportunity to learn about agriculture and food systems.
STEPS is a three-year, multi-institutional Higher Education Challenge Grant project hosted at the University of Georgia, with collaboration from experts at North Carolina State University, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, and University of Minnesota. The project is in its second year of operation, and in the third year, the team intends to publish all validated HCS-RLO data they have collected on their website, making it freely accessible to everyone to use to enhance their own systems thinking processes.
