It's hard to judge "whole new ways of thinking", and mine isn't always consistent. It's experimental, and a little strange. Basically, I figured out what's so 'wrong' about scientific models of nature that they can't make any sense of living systems. About 20 years ago I broke with one of the great experimental intellectual movements of the 20th century, the general theory of systems. It has now failed entirely it seems, and I'm still working. Like conventional science I start with data, watching and recording the flows of change, but unlike conventional science I don't look for the equation it represents. I think of the data as a glove and use it to help visualize the hand it represents, sometimes using mathematical markers. I use the data backwards. The reason science has actually failed to find any scientific evidence of life on earth is that it is still stuck making Plato's mistake, thinking everything must follow ideal chains of necessity, still looking for the equations. Living systems evolve uniquely from scratch right where you find them, little hurricanes of self-organization, growing from internal loops of opportunity, not necessity. Most places where you see evidence of regular growth what's happening is a rapid evolution of those internal loops. You generally don't see them, they're inside. Looking only for the opposite, the outside 'determinants' of behavior, is the mistake.
A lot of it is perceptual. Our perspective as observers places us 'outside the loop' (making what's inside other things mostly invisible) of most everything that's happening around us. That's why people all seem to live in different worlds. We all exist in tremendous ignorance of what's happening around us, and actually do live in different worlds ourselves, and make up our own images of everything. In a world composed mostly of 'dark matter', you need a flashlight. Watch the growth trends. That gives you a reliable outside indication of where there's something marvelous happening inside, all of biological life and lots lots more. You frequently can't trace the connections of the loops, but you can begin to read the evolution of the whole from the shapes of change in any part, and perhaps better guess their futures. You'll find we're surrounded by a large population of living things we hadn't noticed before, the many large and small 'storm cells' of change, for which we yet have no names.
Being 'out of the loop' is one challenge, being 'out of control' is another. The study of living things is about what's 'out of control', and in more cases than not is a matter of learning how to get along rather than how to take over. The internal loops of natural systems are loops of opportunity, momentarily connecting abandoned and unclaimed things left lying around, not loops of necessity where all parts are either centrally or remotely controlled. For what makes nature work we've had the wrong model. Our success with it has helped us evolve, but it won't be enough for survival.
A third perceptual problem is that our ideas about change are built on a sliding scale, a little more, a little less, always referencing the present. That's why we can utter a phrase like 'constant percentage change' without blowing out our brains. Though our society has been getting twice as big and twice as complicated every 20 years for the last few hundred (16 times as big and complicated every lifetime, a million times as big and complicated in just 5 lifetimes), and is expected to keep doing that... forever..., we still look at life with most of the same categories and range of personal issues we had long ago. If we didn't have a sliding scale of perception we couldn't do that. Still, the earth itself does not have that 'nifty' feature. The earth is a stable system and we need to begin becoming one too. Growth is an unstable system. Fixing the institutions we've built around it will require a change in perception perhaps as great as being born. Maybe someone will say what that means, or maybe people will have to figure that out for themselves. Still, its real clear we need to make the earth our home, not just our launch site!
The subject is the 'vast conspiracies' of nature, the open systems where organization is continually evolving, widely distributed and all the chains look broken. Figuring them out isn't really possible, but we can learn much better what to expect. Unfortunately our old preoccupations lead us to look for what's in control. Because natural systems don't work that way the best use of your thinking about them may be, as mine is, to regularly throw all your ideas away, and use them for compost for growing new ones. Building a new way of thinking is like creating a forest from a dessert. Patient observation is the rain.
It's about what develops locally from opportunity and resources, not what follows globally from force and pressure, the pull half of the universe not the push half. The central structure of nature is all the stuff left lying around, the medium of exchange where individuals take what they can use and leave what they're done with, the blood stream, atmosphere, street, store shelves and library, etc. etc., all the places where stocks of things are left lying around. Science has beautifully documented what things necessarily follow from others, the many useful things that can be controlled, and those won't go away. We'll just become more familiar with the other half.