Hello — thank you for your question: it’s a very interesting one. To me agile as well as DT is just a modus operandi — it can be as easily applied to the reductionist as to holistic approach. But in its essence both these approaches assume that the world is far too complex to figure everything out beforehand, therefore it seems more reasonable to bite any problem piece by piece rather than as a whole (like the traditional waterfall approach tried to do).

But the bottom-line question I am reading from you is the definition of the systems thinking, right? My definition is perhaps overly simplistic but it goes like this: systems thinking is to see a problem like a human body — with hands and legs, brain, emotions, capabilities, social conditions and the overall health. In that sense both Design Thinking and agile seem to be more successful in tapping into the problems defined as such than more traditional approaches (which are perfectly ok for simple and complicated problems).

And how methodologies such as PESTLE fit into this whole picture? While agile and DT are about how you act, PESTLE is to me a step before — it is a means to get to understand what you are going to feed into the agile or DT process. It is a means to try to understand the broader domain of the problem itself. It is a means to first define and then validate whether the agile sprints are taking us in the right direction. Does it make sense?