Buckminster Fuller called thinking the process of eliminating irrelevancies.
It’s a top-down, systems-based approach where you start with everything you know and systematically weed out things that aren’t important to the system you want to understand.
Imagine a baseball game. A player in that game is expected to “focus on the game.” The specific game she’s playing becomes the system she’s thinking about.
She should dismiss all factors of her universe that aren’t relevant to that game. If she’s thinking about paying the bills or what she’s going to eat tonight, then she’s “distracted.”
Within the game, the relevant factors are in constant flux. She’ll attempt to be aware of all relevant factors such as the weather, the location of the ball, what bases are filled, the record of the current batter, what players she might need to throw to in the event of a hit in her direction, etc. She’s anticipating what might happen. She’s comprehensively looking at all relevant factors.
If the situation changes, new factors (such as an obscure rule) might become relevant and other factors might become irrelevant. The game is a dynamic system that needs to be constantly monitored and rethought.
When I was in little league, I didn’t have the knowledge of the game that I needed to do this effectively. My universe did not include all the relevant factors I would have to deal with and so I dealt with them ineffectively. I played badly.
When it comes to solving the big problems of this world, most of us are playing badly.
