Systems Thinking
Table of Contents:
Systems Thinking—
Summary of Systems Principles
12 Places to Intervene in a System (In increasing order of effectiveness)
15 Guidelines for living in a world of systems
Text
Audio
Video
Websites & Groups
Systems Thinking—
Abstract: “The holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way a system's constituent parts interrelate, and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems.”
I am a system and a complex one at that. You are a complex system as well, dear reader. I am going to pose a very straightforward and simple question: What else is a system? Although it will sound hyperbolic, my answer would be just about everything in reality.
In this essay, I will talk about Systems Thinking and I hope, by the end, you will begin to see the world through a systems-principles lens moving forward. You see and interact with untold numbers of conscious and unconscious systems every day. Your body is a system, including your intestines, capillaries, and brain. Your cat’s body is too. The interstates are aptly called the “highway system.” Your country is a system, along with its culture. Any electronics are systems. The Dutch East India Trading Company was a system. Government, Economics, Education are all systems. Whether your laundry pile is a system is debatable, however. What do you think?
Two “thought” primers before we get into the material: Scale and Modeling.
Let’s start with scale. Where are my Men In Black fans? In the movie is a scene where the camera zooms out from NYC through the atmosphere, past the outside of our solar system, then past the Milky Way galaxy, to you seeing that our entire universe is a little marble used by another creature/alien playing a game on a truly incomprehensible scale.
Let’s begin with the biggest system we know of: The Universe. The system elements of the entire universe would obviously include the “observable” universe but also the not-so-obvious “non-observable” universe (farther than telescopes can see). Also, to really wrap your head around systems thinking, be dumbfounded by the fact that our entire universe MAY be only PART of an infinitely larger “Many Worlds Theory” Universe.
I bring this up to open your mind to the inevitable conclusion that there are different systems at almost every level of reality, all crisscrossing at different proportions and with varying degrees of influence. Here is the best visualization of the scale of our universe. (Disclaimer: You might want to sit down if you aren’t already because it is quite mind-boggling for our proto-conscious human brain to wrap our heads around, if at all, in any meaningful way.)
What is the smallest system we know of? The answer has become more accurate over time. It used to be a cell. Then it was the atom. Then it was quarks - the subatomic particles that make up atoms. Now it is the Planck Length. But that may just be the threshold of our current knowledge and may change, or may not...
We have no idea how far the universe *really* goes in either direction of the spectrum, large-scale universe size, or the small-scale quantum level.
The second primer has to deal with Models--almost all mental models. I have to remind you that “everything we think we know about the world is a model.” This idea was brilliantly captured when Bryan Magee interviewed Noam Chomsky:
“Each one of us forms a systematically distorted view of the world because it's all built upon what accidentally happens to be the particular & really rather narrow experience of the individual who does it. Now do you think that something of that kind applies to man as a whole because of the reasons implicit in your theory? That is to say that the whole picture that mankind has formed of the cosmos of the universe of the world must be systematically distorted and what's more drastically limited by the nature of the particular apparatus for understanding that he happens to have.” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kmvVwtT4eI
Depending on your perspective, this can be viewed as:
Less potential in pursuit of never attaining perfectionism in “our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.”
Or, sheer awe in the ability to shape your/our environment in “our models do have a strong congruence with the world.”
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Summary of System Principles
Almost all of the information discussed in this essay comes from Donella M. Meadows’s magnum opus “Thinking In Systems: A Primer.” (We also pull from Daniel Kim’s Introduction to Systems Thinking PDF and other sources listed within the links). Both are exquisite in their deft layman’s explanation of a system, its behavior, and its view of ‘Thinking in Systems.’ Meadows’s primer has numerous illustrations and graphs to pair with the simple text. Words like stocks, flows, equilibrium, and feedback loops are usual terms known to the casual reader, but the book goes deeper with definitions and examples of resilience, self-organization, hierarchy, shifting dominance, delays, and oscillations. Not only does the author offer a thoughtful view of all the components of the system, but also provides pithy responses to system traps with real-world examples!
We are specifically focusing on systems thinking, “as in the holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. The systems-thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements.” With biology, cybernetics, and ecology as its roots, systems thinking “provides a way of looking at how the world works that differs markedly from the traditional reductionistic, analytic view.”
As we continue on our systems-thinking journey, let’s remember:
A system is more than the sum of its parts.
Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information.
The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.
System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.
The sources of system surprises (or challenges) come in many shapes, sizes, but in the end are always connected. Some are quite counter-intuitive, actually.
Many relationships in systems are nonlinear.
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting.
Any physical entity with multiple inputs and outputs is surrounded by layers of limits.
There always will be limits of growth.
A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.
Where there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.
The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.
To read the rest of the essay, go to either the Substack or Medium link.
Substack: https://eclecticspacewalk.substack.com/p/eclectic-spacewalk-2-systems-thinking
Medium: https://medium.com/eclectic-spacewalk/eclectic-spacewalk-2-systems-thinking-928fcf766c3d