In addition to reading about systems thinking, I would recommend actively practicing it. I’ve found that looking for and cataloging abstract patterns has developed my ability to recognize and reason about real-world systems.
I've been working on a project that is something like "a framework of abstractions". I've found that studying and developing its concepts has been a great exercise in abstract thinking. Check it out and see if it's the type of thing you might be interested in. https://github.com/perspectivesonatheme/patterns
I'd also recommend learning some Haskell and category theory. It's difficult stuff and I won't pretend to have a solid handle on either, but what I have learned has been eye-opening.
Wikipedia is an incredible resource and I have relied on it heavily in the development of this project. But for specific areas, an integrated, specialized approach gives you more control over things like organization, format, and what content to include or exclude.
That's like saying you don't need math. For the most part, in everyday life, that's true, but there are cases where functional human beings disagree, or we find ourselves in novel situations that we don't know how to handle. In those cases, we need new ways to think and communicate. Intuition works great for catching a ball, but you'll need math to land a rocket on mars.
The dichotomy I usually use is between science and engineering. Science is about breaking systems down into components. Engineering is about composing components into systems. This project is very much on the science side of that. It doesn't propose any courses of action or anything. And yes, most of the concepts are pretty standard. The purpose of the project is to put them all out in the open so they can themselves be studied, and also so we can have a shared langauge about this sort of stuff.
That does indeed fit, using the interpretation that introducing a pathogen in a controlled manner has its own risks, but may prevent the relatively severe effects of an infection. I'll add it as an example in the next push.
For an example of what I mean, take a look at this project: https://github.com/perspectivesonatheme/patterns