Systems Thinking

Analogy

Systems Thinking is like analyzing a food web.

It isn’t adequate to solely understand one level or interaction within a food chain. You have to grasp how the various species interact with each other, which is the keystone species, who are the predators and prey, which species make up the foundation, and understand how they all tie together and impact one another.

This process helps you not only understand the structure but the dynamics and interactions between all the species.

This is a holistic, dynamic, non-linear synthesis rather than a static analysis.

Diagram

Example

The multidisciplinary journey we are currently on together can be considered an experiment in systems thinking. Rather than learning isolated facts, we are trying to tie these core principles together so that they can combine and interlock into a holistic, usable form. This search for fundamental building blocks and coming to deeply understand how they interact and influence each other is the most powerful way to construct effective mental models. This creates a solid foundational understanding – enabling you to deconstruct complex problems into its constituent parts, which helps clarify the problem and its potential solution. This is systems thinking at its core and developing this mode of thinking is helpful regardless of context or industry.

If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.

– Kurt Lewin

It is an axiom of systems thinking that the best way to deduce a system’s purpose is first to watch it to see how it behaves before disturbing it. This forces you to focus on facts and long-term behavior rather than theories and anecdotes. We must resist the temptation to force our biases, assumptions, and rigid frameworks on the problem. Instead, let your view develop organically. Some world-renowned consulting firms have made this part of their operating framework, and they begin by simply observing and asking questions. They are constructing an understanding of the system and how it behaves before they try to interject and change things. This honors second-order thinking, and that complex systems are, in fact, complex and difficult to understand. As John Gall says in his enlightening and sarcastic book, The Systems Bible:

If a big system doesn’t work, it won’t work. Pushing systems doesn’t help and adding manpower to a late project typically doesn’t help. However, some complex systems do work and these should be left alone. Don’t change anything. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. Few areas offer greater potential reward than understanding the transition from working simple system to working complex system.

If you simply barge in and change things without a deep understanding, you’re likely to do more harm than good, and you won’t understand the impact your changes have had (Complexity).

Plain English

To begin to understand systems thinking, we must first understand what a system is. Systems are sets of interconnected networks whose influence on each other forms a whole. They can be self-organizing, self-repairing (up to a point), resilient, and many are evolutionary (adaptive). Systems have survived nature’s culling and are one of the most robust organizing principles there are (Evolution, Hierarchies). Broadly, systems are defined by the movement or “flows” of resources between reservoirs or “stocks.”

A system is a set of two or more elements that satisfies the following 3 conditions: 1) the behavior of each element has an effect on the behavior of the whole, 2) the behavior of the elements and their effects on the whole are interdependent, 3) however subgroups of the elements are formed, each has an effect on the behavior of the whole and none an independent effect on it. A system, therefore, is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts..The essential properties of a system taken as a whole derive from the interactions of its parts, not their actions taken separately. Therefore, when a system is taken apart it loses its essential properties. Because of this – and this is the critical point – a system is a whole that cannot be understood by analysis.
– Russell Ackoff, Ackoff’s Best

Proper systems thinking takes into account the structure of the system, the agents and their interactions/incentives, and the dynamics of the system (a system’s behavior over time). This is necessary to understand the connections between events and the resulting behavior of the structure – real power lies in the connections.

This approach is helpful to get to the root of the problem and understand why the system behaves the way it does, thereby increasing the chance of implementing a sustainable long-term solution, rather than simply fighting fires. While systems can’t be controlled, they can be designed and redesigned, and this is why first deeply understanding the system as a whole is so important – it helps you mitigate blind spots and unintended negative consequences. What makes a sustainable difference is not brute force, but redesigning the system to improve the information, incentives, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints that impact your agents. You must change the structure to change the behaviors (Structure & Function).

From the process of working back and forth between assumptions about the parts and the observed behavior of the whole, we improve our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the system.

– Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

Some other important factors that Donella Meadows outlines in her excellent book, Thinking in Systems, include:

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is composed – the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts (Lollapalooza Effects, Complexity, Emergence).
A prime reason a system exists is to ensure its own self-preservation.

Technical Description

Systems theory is the interdisciplinary study of systems. A system is a cohesive conglomeration of interrelated and interdependent parts that is either natural or man-made. Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose or nature and expressed in its functioning. In terms of its effects, a system can be more than the sum of its parts if it expresses synergy or emergent behavior. Changing one part of the system usually affects other parts and the whole system, with predictable patterns of behavior. For systems that are self-learning and self-adapting, the positive growth and adaptation depend upon how well the system is adjusted with its environment. Some systems function mainly to support other systems by aiding in the maintenance of the other system to prevent failure. The goal of systems theory is systematically discovering a system’s dynamics, constraints, conditions and elucidating principles (purpose, measure, methods, tools, etc.) that can be discerned and applied to systems at every level of nesting, and in every field for achieving optimized equifinality. – Wikipedia

Quotes

The behavior of a system is its performance over time – growth, stagnation, decline, oscillation, randomness, evolution.

– Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems

…dividing the cow in half does not give you two smaller cows. You may end up with a lot of hamburger, but the essential nature of “cow” – a living system capable, among other things, of turning grass into milk – then would be lost. This is what we mean when we say a system functions as a “whole.” Its behavior depends on its entire structure and not just on adding up the behavior of its different pieces.

– Draper Kauffman

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

– GK Chesterton, The Thing

Those who are most successful are capable of higher-level thinking – able to step back and design a “machine” consisting of the right people doing the right things to get what they want.

– Ray Dalio, Principles

If you try to change your behavior without first changing the underlying structure causing that behavior, you will not succeed. This is because structure determines behavior, not the other way around.

– Robert Fritz, The Path of Least Resistance

Look before changing – in the old Navy of sail there was a custom that the new officer of the deck did not call for any change in the setting of the sails for one half hour – that is, for one bell after he took over. The same thing might well apply to commanders and staff officers who take over new jobs in war. They should wait at least a week before they make any radical changes, unless and except they are put in to correct a situation which is in a bad way.

– General George Patton, War As I Knew It

Problems are disciplinary in nature. Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary. Systems thinking is holistic; it attempts to derive understanding of parts from the behavior and properties of wholes, rather than derive the behavior and properties of wholes from those of their parts. Disciplines are taken by science to represent different parts of the reality we experience. In effect, science assumes the reality is structured and organized in the same way universities are. This is a double error. First, disciplines do not constitute different parts of reality; they are different aspects of reality; different points of view. Any part of reality can be viewed from any of these aspects. The whole can be understood only by viewing it from all the perspectives simultaneously. Second, the separation of our different points of view encourages looking for solutions to problems with the same point of view from which the problem was formulated. Quoting Einstein, “Without changing our pattern of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current patterns of thought.” When we know how a system works, how its parts are connected, and how the parts interact to produce the behavior and properties of the whole, we can almost always find one or more points of view that lead to better solutions than those we would have arrived at from the point of view from which the problem was formulated. For example, we do not try to cure a headache by brain surgery, but by putting a pill in the stomach. We do this because we understand how the body, a biological system, works. When science divides reality up into disciplinary parts and deals with them separately, it reveals a lack of understanding of reality as a whole, as a system.

– Russell Ackoff, A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

While acknowledging that disciplinary segmentation evolved as a way of coping with the complexity of the universe and the study of it, systems theorists challenge the presumption that the world is best understood by segmenting our investigation of it into discrete disciplinary areas, each of which specializes in a particular perspective, level of analysis, or phenomena. Systems theorists argue that such an approach may not be the most appropriate one for meaningfully addressing the complexity of life, and also point to the limitations this structure imposes on the advancement of general and integrative knowledge. Perhaps, one of the most tangible manifestations of this problem can be seen in the curriculum of the average undergraduate student, which offers up a biological view of life in the first hour, a psychological view second hour, a communication view third hour, sociological fourth, political science fifth, and so on, as if human behavior could be best comprehended when compartmentalized in such a manner…Nature does not come to us in disciplinary form. Phenomena are not physical, chemical, biological, and so on. The disciplines are the ways we study phenomena; they emerge from points of view, not from what is viewed. Hence the disciplinary nature of science is a filing system of knowledge. Its organization is not to be confused with the organization of nature itself…In brief, the need to assemble knowledge of our world into one cohesive view derives from the necessity to take it apart in order to penetrate it in depth.

– Russell Ackoff, On Purposeful Systems

If each part of a system, considered separately, is made to operate as efficiently as possible, the system as a whole will not operate as effectively as possible. For example, if we took the highest quality parts from various cars and put them all together into a new car, we would not even obtain an automobile because the parts would not fit together. Even if they did, they would not work well together. The performance of a system depends more on how its parts interact than on how they act independently of each other. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

– Russell Ackoff, Ackoff’s Best

I think of Patagonia as an ecosystem, with its vendors and customers an integral part of that system. A problem anywhere in the system eventually affects the whole, and this gives everyone an overriding responsibility to the health of the whole organism. It also means that anyone, low on the totem pole or high, inside the company or out, can contribute significantly to the health of the company and to the integrity and value of our products…The whole supply chain has to be a functioning, interconnected system.

– Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing

Interconnected Ideas