Design Thinking(DT) and Systems Thinking (ST) came about through totally different and unrelated processes. The philosophies of both can be traced back hundreds of years but there has been a recent resurgence in their application. DT as popularized today has its initial roots in business, especially in product design where innovative products are designed to meet people’s needs and thereby understand how to facilitate innovation. DT was extended and applied to management and soon it assumed the concepts of Systems Thinking, which, as will be shown later has been more established and developed over a longer period of time. Questions began to be
asked as to how this new Design Thinking relates/ compares to ST. In some circles, it was welcome and seen to complement ST. If it is to be welcomed as an additional approach/ methodology to complement Systems Thinking in the search for ways to tackle the many wicked problems that are faced in modern day life; a further question is whether there are such problems that will be more amenable to this approach than the other existing system
methodologies. In this vein, this paper is an extension of the previous paper;“How to Choose Systems Methods?” by Barry Clemson published in Systems Thinking World Journal: Reflection in Action (2013), and Nicolas Stampf’s “How Not to choose Systems Methods”written in response to David Alman’s (2012) STW discussion “How do I figure out which System thinking method or model is appropriate to the situation I’m trying to figure out how to deal with?”