In the absence of meaningful strategies to promote critical thinking,
systems thinking, and social intelligence, it has been argued that
algorithm-driven web technology will not only serve to damage human
creativity, technology may ultimately reduce our collective
intelligence. At the same time, the history of group decision-making in
education, business, and public administration highlights that working
groups often fail to solve complex problems because their method of
collaborative problem solving is ineffective. Decades of research in
social psychology and the learning sciences highlight the many
limitations of group problem solving, including the tendency to focus on
a limited set of ideas, select ideas based on biased ‘rules of thumb’,
and failure to build trust, consensus and collective vision. A
fundamental skill for resolving complex social and scientific problems
is the ability to collectively visualise the structure of a shared
problem, and use this knowledge to design solutions and strategies for
collective action. In this chapter, we describe an approach to knowledge
cartography that seeks to overcome three independent human limitations
which impede our ability to resolve complex problems: poor critical
thinking skills, no clear methodology to facilitate group coherence,
consensus design and collective action, and limited computational
capacities. Building on Warfield’s vision for applied systems sciences,
we outline a new systems science tool which currently combines two
thought structuring methodologies: Argument Mapping for critical
thinking, and Interactive Management for system design. We further
describe how teaching and learning a form of knowledge cartography
grounded in applied systems science requires a vision around the
development of Tools, Talents, and Teams. We also provide examples of
how our approach to knowledge cartography and applied systems science
has been used in business and educational settings.