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Despite many scholars having been ‘thinking in systems’ for centuries, the global scientific community recognises the establishment of systems thinking as a formal discipline in the late 1950s, when system dynamics modelling was first introduced in the field of engineering management, 1 to subsequent application in physics and ecology in the 1970s2 and in organisational management thereafter.3–5 Since then, the discipline has expanded to use in virtually all fields, from economics to ecology,6–8 and started gaining attention in global health in the early 2000s, when the British Medical Journal published a series centred around complexity science application to health systems research,9 10 echoed in the following years by increasing calls for the adoption of systems thinking in public health.11 After the publication of the flagship report of the WHO Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research ‘Systems Thinking for Health Systems Strengthening’ in 2009,12 systems thinking has seen an expansion of its adoption in global health, particularly in health policy and systems research.13