Most people use "systems thinking" as a catch-all for any brain that sees the big picture. But there are at least three distinct ways brains process wholes, and conflating them misses what's actually going on. Especially if your brain is AuDHD, twice-exceptional, or gifted.

Gestalt processing is perceptual. Your brain automatically groups shapes by proximity and similarity. Bottom-up. You see the forest without trying. If you're neurodivergent, you might relate to this sometimes (I do), but the research on autistic cognition says it's probably not your default. Weak central coherence means your brain tends to privilege the details over the whole. So this one might feel close, but not quite right.

Systems thinking is deliberate. You model feedback loops (i.e., raising interest rates cools housing, which slows construction, which eventually constrains supply and pushes prices back up), second-order effects (i.e., automating a factory floor increases output but eliminates the informal knowledge transfer that happened between shifts), and temporal dynamics (i.e., a policy that stabilizes a market in year one creates a bubble by year five). Top-down. You sit down, draw the map, and trace root systems on purpose. If you're gifted or 2e, this one probably sounds more like you. You can absolutely do it. But if you're being honest, is this how your best insights actually arrive? Or does the pattern show up first, and then you reverse-engineer the model to explain it?

There's a third option. I'll share it tomorrow.