Discovering trends through systems thinking

I've always enjoyed reading history. Current events are also a strong interest of mine. It was great this weekend to learn a new tool for unpacking all the connections we see in everyday life and notice how trends emerge from these connections. The article about Haiti and the Dominican Republic was very interesting. I've always wondered at the stark differences between the two countries and it was great to get a deeper understanding of how the current state of affairs there came to be. I was also struck with the idea that because of the proximity and the unique differences between the histories of the two countries, particularly the way in which external influences caused the D.R government to fail initially and internal forces caused the Haitian government to fail, that the two lessons learned here can be of great benefit to the current governmental struggles going on in Iraq and Afganistan. I imagine that this has been obvious to whomever is in charge of policy in restructuring governments, but it is exciting to be able to apply systems thinking to things on such a large scale. I've become increasingly interested in strategic planning and am very interested to continue to explore how systems thinking can be used to discover trends and how it can be applied to strategic planning.