Skills to analyze the world form a systems perspective do not come naturally. They must be learned. Including typical resistance to change in systems, there are three inherent inabilities to clearly perceiving systems. They are spatial blindness, temporal blindness and relationship blindness. Spatial blindness is the failure to grasp the "big picture." Through concentration on details of the specific parts of either a system or only the whole, but never on the connectiveness of everything as a whole. Temporal blindness focuses on results from the immediate compounded by ignorance of the past and lack of the future. It prevents learning from what has occurred in the past and blocks effective future planning. The third principal is relationship blindness. People often portray many roles in life such as, a parent, manager, wife, co-worker, neighbor, voter, etc. Through these multiple roles systems intertwine. Yet, people are blind to the possibilities that unknown events or decisions made at home, next door or even across the country could have an impact within their lives. The skills of systems thinking possess the tools to remove systems blindness. In doing so, the perceptions of systems will become clearer, leading to a greater understanding of the parts connected as a whole. .
Systems thinking requires the use of tools as problem solving methods. Some of those tools are storytelling, thinking in links and loops and system archetypes. To begin understanding the problem, systems thinking requires bringing the story or stories that underlie the problem to the surface. Surfacing such stories, also known as storytelling, begins to form thoughts about why the system functions the way it does. Identifying essential themes along with recurring patterns will describe a series of events. After telling the story and identifying patterns, two building blocks represent all systems in looking for simple connections that can explain what could be driving a series of events.