After the unanticipated financial crisis of Korea in 1997, lots of debates have been held on how to manage the crisis. However, few studies attempt to analyze policy makers′ map that shaped and guided various measures for overcoming the crisis. This paper explores cognitive maps and systems thinking of the President of Korea who successfully managed the financial crisis. Futhermore, his cognitive map is compared to that of Prime Minister of Malaysia who overcome financial crisis successfully but in different ways. In this paper the causal map analysis of policy makers is proposed as a promising approach for in-depth investigation of systems thinking of policy makers.