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Keep shoppingSystems Thinking for Business: Solve Complex Problems [EN]
2,688 students
Systems Thinking for Business: Solve Complex Problems [EN]
systems thinking | root cause analysis rca | problem solving | business process mapping | triz | organizational design
Last updated 5/2025
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Break an open-ended problem into parts with MECE so nothing is missed
- Find the real root cause and confirm it, rather than stopping at a plausible story
- Use Pareto and constraint analysis to find where the damage actually sits
- Resolve a contradiction with TRIZ instead of settling for a compromise
- Map a process so the break point becomes visible to everyone in the room
- Redesign an organisational structure using design drivers rather than preference
- Run a diagnostic on an organisation and choose the right intervention level
- Measure whether an intervention worked, including its return on investment
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
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Course content
14 sections • 38 lectures • 22h 13m total length
Requirements
- A recurring problem in your organisation that has survived several attempts to fix it
- No formal background required. Every framework is built from the beginning
- Something to draw on — a whiteboard, paper or any diagramming tool
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to find out that the thing you have been fixing was a symptom
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
If a problem keeps coming back after you solve it, you are not solving it. You are removing a symptom that the system regenerates on schedule.
Why the fix never holds
The pattern is always the same. Something goes wrong, somebody finds a cause that sounds right, a fix is applied, and everyone moves on. Four months later it happens again, usually to a different team, and it is treated as a new incident. I have signed off on that fix more than once. What I eventually learned is that the cause I found was the first plausible one, not the real one, and the structure and the process that produced it were never touched.
What this course actually covers
Five blocks, from how you think to how you intervene. First, critical thinking: what makes an argument strong, which biases decide what cause you find before you start looking, and the decision models for acting under uncertainty. Second, problems without a known answer: framing with 5W1H and SCQA, breaking them down with MECE, five whys and Ishikawa for the root, Pareto and the theory of constraints for where the damage sits, TRIZ for contradictions that will not compromise, and how to run all of it with a group. Third, the system as flows: describing a process in BPMN until the break point is visible to everyone. Fourth, the system as structure: the six design drivers, archetypes and matrices, the leadership layer, and how to run a transition. Fifth, intervening: diagnosis, choosing the level of intervention, delivering it, and measuring whether it worked, including return on investment.
A note on the examples
Fourteen of the thirty-eight lessons use people-side examples — hiring and onboarding processes, interventions at individual and team level. The apparatus does not depend on that. BPMN, RACI, cause-effect diagrams, the Kirkpatrick model and the balanced scorecard behave identically whatever the process contains. I am telling you now rather than letting you discover it in lesson twenty-one.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 38 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working frameworks: MECE, 5W1H, SCQA, five whys, Ishikawa, Pareto, TRIZ, BPMN, the six design drivers, Kirkpatrick
Real organisational cases, including Wargaming and ArcelorMittal
Where to start
Take a problem your company has fixed at least twice. Write down the cause you accepted each time. If both answers describe something a person did rather than something the system arranged, you already have your first case for this course. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers whose problems keep coming back after being solved
- Leaders who suspect the structure, not the people, is producing the result
- Operations and transformation specialists diagnosing what is actually wrong
- Consultants and analysts brought in when the obvious fixes have failed
- Process owners who have documented a process and changed nothing
- Founders whose company has outgrown the way it was originally arranged
- Anyone who has watched a reorganisation solve nothing and wants to know why