As a positive psychologist and therefore also with a keen interest in positive emotions I see a strong connection between systems thinking and the research being done on positive emotions.

Where negative emotions tend to behave very simplistic (fear = run) positive emotions behave according to a complex system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system. And it seems as though a complex system is exactly what explains systems thinking as you describe it.

Barbara Fredricksom covers in her book Positivity how positive emotions broadens our perpective and builds our capabilities. She discovered that experiencing positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones leads people creative thinking in a manor very similar to your description of systems thinking.

Psychology has with positive psychology finally taken a serious interest in what works and with that found so many interesting ways of describing ways of learning and living.

As you say, we live in a world where from time to time even the basic rules seem to change, and paradigms shift, often without too much ‘warning’ for people who have taken their eyes off the road.

To be even more like the real world, then, LEGO bricks would have to occasionally morph so that they were no longer based on studs and tubes, but were stuck together with interlocking triangles, or bolts, or suction!

Of course, that would make it an unsatisfactory toy, or creative material, as we like to be able to predict how things will hold together (in LEGO) without the anxiety about the system changing altogether.

So … would you say that LEGO helps us to learn about systems, such as those which exist in the world, but in a somewhat ‘protected’ environment?

Interesting stuff, thanks.