2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As engineering leadership educators, we must constantly ask ourselves what skills, attitudes and perspectives students need to gain from our programs. If leadership is “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (Northouse, 2010), we have to think about equipping students with the skills not only to influence others, but also to identify the goal; in engineering terms, to define the problem to be solved.

The problems that we face as a society are becoming more open, complex, dynamic, and networked: they cannot be solved by individual people in siloed disciplines, but rather will require an interdisciplinary approach. However, most engineering education does not give students the chance to explore complex problems. In a study of curricula for eight North American undergraduate engineering programs found that over 95% of engineering courses used well-structured problems (Schuelke-Leech, 2020); no courses engaged students on wicked problems – problems with multiple stakeholders and competing demands, which often contain ethical, social, political, or environmental dimensions.

Systems thinking has been described as a perspective, a language, and a set of tools (Monat and Gannon, 2015). System mapping is a methodology to help groups collaboratively build shared visualizations of the mental models of the systems they are trying to change, gaining insights into the complexities of a given issue (Johnson et al., 2019).

In a recently developed engineering leadership elective at the University of Toronto, engineering students from multiple disciplines are given an opportunity to investigate a wicked problem of their choice and to develop their systems thinking skills. Examples of problems explored include responsible mining in Chile, or improving transit access to underserved communities. Over the course of a semester, students work in teams to develop system maps that incorporate both the technical and the social aspects of their challenges; the visualizations enable them to identify leverage points in the system that might yield significant changes (Meadows, 1999). These leverage points can then be used to define the area of intervention, which may or may not require technical interventions at all.

This practice paper is aligned to the Inform strategic priority of the LEAD division. The paper will share observations from the first two offerings of the course, based on instructor reflections, student deliverables and semi-structured interviews conducted with students. Students were able to demonstrate significant engagement with wicked problems and achieve new insights, with students reporting that their engagement with systems thinking methodologies gave them new perspectives on the selected problems, augmented their decision making and enabled effective expression. The paper will offer concepts for bringing systems thinking to other engineering courses and for understanding systems thinking as a leadership skill.