Here, we discuss three real-world problems that would have benefitted from a greater application of systems thinking. The first example is about a social worker tasked with a decision on whether to remove an obese child from his family for health reasons. The second example is the homelessness problem that has exploded in major cities in the USA despite increasing efforts and roughly $3 billion in recurring expenditures to stabilize it. The third example is the Boeing 737 MAX problem, where a miscalibrated angle of attack sensor, a very minor and well-understood element of flight controls, interacted with other well-understood technical and administrative elements to cost lives and more than 50 billion dollars in damage to the manufacturer. All are examples of emergent hard-to-predict behaviors that result from the interplay of several causal relationships.