This primer covers the essential strategic skill of systems and strategic thinking. It has two key objectives:

• To define systems and strategic thinking, explaining why it is an important strategic skill for public health practitioners at the local, state, and federal levels.
• To analyze how systems thinking can help public health managers stimulate their teams to share different experiences, knowledge, and perspectives to solve important public health challenges.

Part of the Strategic Skills for Public Health Practice Series, Systems and Strategic Thinking provides a new way of approaching problems and solutions from a perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness, relationships, patterns, and synergies. Systems and strategic thinking provides a framework practitioners can use to intervene in complex public health issues, moving their efforts from individual program silos toward approaches that take a more holistic point of view.