Why are we so bad at thinking about systems? Many people have made some version of this argument. Systems thinking is a way of viewing and thinking about the world as a large interconnected system whereby the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts. But any look at ancient people’s understanding of their environment would quickly dispel this notion. They understood when to hunt certain animals, when certain foods were available to forage, when to expect certain weather patterns and so on. For thousands of years, we seemed to be oddly good at seeing the interconnected nature of reality. We had systems for hunting, gathering, and planting food that, by necessity, were highly compatible with each other. We had systems for creating warriors and systems for forming families. When we look at humanity’s past, what we were oddly good at was forming and thinking in interconnected systems.
The ultra short version of what changed was our ability to separate ourselves from this thing called reality, particularly in the west. We no longer have to care about the weather as we have climatized living and working quarters, indoor plumbing, super markets with food that’s perpetually in season, and on and on. At the same time we have increasingly been allowed to ignore reality, the number of systems we do interact with on a daily basis has actually increased. The myriad of apps on our smartphones, all the supply chains that we come into contact with when we shop at a grocery store or on Amazon, the ubiquity of modern computing and a seemingly infinite number of other systems that we use is extraordinary.
What all these systems seem to have in common is that freakishly few of us have to construct, maintain, or even really understand them in order to use them. We use terms like ergonomic and intuitive to describe systems and tools that are so close to the other systems and tools we are already using that we barely have to learn anything in order to start interacting with them in a pseudo productive fashion.
If we travel back in time a mere 50 years ago and beyond, we used and had access to far fewer systems. But, we also understood the systems we used to a far higher degree than most of the systems we use today. The trade off that we didn’t realize we were making as the world modernized into the digital age and moving into a world of AI was that in order to use so many different systems, we would have to give up our ability to understand systems at a deeper level. To live in a world of an uncountable number of systems that all compete for our attention in ever shorter snipits, we gave up systems thinking as a consequence.
We didn’t realize the benefit to our thinking that came from understanding systems more deeply. It turns out that systems thinking is a skill like any other. And whether that skill is reading, swimming or riding a bike, if we almost never engage in it, we will be terrible at it. If fewer and fewer people think deeply about the systems they engage with, they will become increasingly terrible at thinking about and understanding those systems. Not only will we be terrible at thinking about the immediate systems we use, but we will be even worse still at understanding how those systems are interconnected.
In a world where abstract learning has become king and concrete reality based learning, what I will call experiential learning, is becoming increasingly rare, our understanding of systems has started circling the toilet. Right at the moment when the level of interconnected systems is reaching heights we never dreamt was possible we are turning into knuckle dragging morons that are addicted to our screens. And while our ability to think in systems appears to be bottoming out, I fear it’s only the beginning. .
When dealing with so many complex systems, we must be able to think about them in a way that’s productive. Unlike ancient peoples, we can’t learn about all the systems we interact with at an experiential level. We couldn’t approach the modern era that way even if we had 1000 lifetimes and the assurance that absolutely nothing would change as we learned about all these interconnected systems. Instead, we have but this one life and the systems we do learn about literally change with each passing day. What this means is that we must find a way to simplify our modern understanding of systems in order to make systems thinking possible in the blinding complexity of globally interconnected systems.
The only way to deal with any high level of complexity in a way that allows one to more productively navigate it is to simplify that complexity. But, when we simplify we risk distorting those complex systems. Complex systems are hard enough to learn about on their own. Distorting them only worsens the problem. This is particularly true if we aren’t regularly checking in with reality to see how we are distorting a complex system. This means that in order to simplify a complex system that scales, the first thing we must look for is a way to simplify without distorting. The best way to do this is to learn what are known as 1st principles.
A 1st principle is a universal and unchanging truth about a system that cannot be deduced from other principles. A principle is some basic truth or law. The power of any principle comes in its ability to reduce the need for mental processing through simplification without distortion. This means not only simplifying but also stating plainly the 1st principle without analogies of any kind. 1st principles radically reduce the amount of complexity our mind has to deal with. As demonstrable evidence of the power of 1st principles, let’s use them to understand the concept of a system.
Dictionary.com defines system as an assemblage or combinations of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole. The problem with this definition is that a traditional #2 pencil with its various parts could be seen as a system. But, we never look at a traditional pencil and think of it as a system. We think of it as an object. The Oxford English Dictionary gets a bit closer. It defines a system as a set of things working together as parts of an interconnected mechanism or network. Here we are getting closer to how our mind thinks about a system. They’ve correctly identified the notion of parts doing collective work. What we know about a pencil is that if left to its own devices, it would never do work, collective or otherwise. It would and does just sit there. That notion of collective work is incredibly important to our innate understanding of what a system is.
A system does something or makes something, be it physical or abstract and sometimes both. A pencil along with the human hand that holds it and the mind that directs it creates a system of a sort. It creates a system that writes a note, draws a picture, and so on. Rather than stating that a system must do work, we can better understand the work a system does as something dynamic that produces a common or shared output. That’s literally what working together means. To be working towards a shared output or goal of some kind. This small but critical revelation paves the way for the five 1st principles of a system, the components, inputs, processes, outputs, and purpose.
The components serve as the parts that make up the framework for how the system operates. Components can be both physical and abstract. The physical components of chess are the board and pieces while the abstract components are the rules of chess. Likewise an engine has the physical components that create the physical engine as well as the laws of physics and chemistry by which it operates.
The components are then energized to do work by one or more inputs. Inputs are the energy, resource, and/or concepts that spark a system into a dynamic state of work. The fuel of a car’s engine is its primary input. As the human brain develops after birth, our senses become its primary inputs to fuel our learning. If we view the universe as a system, then the Big Bang is the input that started our universe.
The process is how the components and inputs interact aka work with one another to produce the output. The process is how the work is done by a given system. This is really important. Too many people talk about systems in the absence of anything happening. If a system doesn’t have a functioning process, then it isn’t a system. An engine that doesn’t work is no longer a system. Whether the process is physical, abstract, or both, there must be a process. A static set of components that create no processes do not make up a system.
The output is whatever outcome is produced by the process. This can be a product, action, or concept. The engine of a car creates power that, in conjunction with the transmission and drivetrain transfers that power to the wheels in order to drive the car. But, in order to call something a system it still needs one more 1st principle.
The purpose is why the system was built, and/or exists. If we don’t know the purpose, we can’t measure the efficacy of any output it produces. Without a purpose, any measure of a system’s efficacy is entirely subjective. Without a purpose, when we drop a glass and it shatters on our tile floor, that would be a system.
The existence of a purpose is why we think of a car as a system but don’t think of an avalanche as being a system. The problem with an avalanche is that we can’t identify its purpose, which means we can’t speak to whether or not that system works. While avalanches, earthquakes, floods, dropping a glass and countless other natural and artificial phenomena absolutely can be said to have the other four 1st principles of a system, without a purpose, it’s clear that our minds don’t classify them as a system.
This allows us to finally understand the proper definition of a system. A system is a set of components that, upon receiving the necessary inputs, creates a process that produces a purpose driven output. When we see these five 1st principles met for a given phenomenon, we immediately understand it to be a system. Whether that’s a computer program, like the apps on our phones, a Rube Golderberg device that prepares two slices of toast, or the freakishly complex system of the human brain. When we can observe all five 1st principles we will naturally identify whatever we are observing as a system.
If you want a better understanding of this just think about the Earth itself. More and more people have begun to describe the Earth as a large system, but why is that? It’s because the more we learn about how life works and how the Earth works, we begin to see the Earth as a system whose design appears to be to sustain life. Let’s start with Earth’s core. The core of our planet provides us with a strong electromagnetic shield against radiation. Without it, virtually all of life on our planet would be dead from cosmic radiation. Our core also produces volcanoes. While they certainly can be destructive, they also serve to spread important mineral deposits all over the globe via eruptions. Then there’s the tectonic plates that are also dependent upon the molten nature of Earth’s core. As these giant plates subsume, diverge, and converge upon one another, they recycle the elemental mix of the surface of our planet slowly replenishing the essential elements required for Earth’s crust to sustain life.
Then there’s the water on our planet. The oceans serve as the reservoir of water that all of life drinks from directly or indirectly. The oceans allow for massive amounts of water to evaporate into our Earth’s atmosphere to fall back to Earth as various forms of precipitation. That creates the fresh water upon which nearly all of terrestrial life depends. These oceans also serve as giant heat sinks to hold enough of the Sun’s heat to keep our planet warm. The atmosphere also serves as our green house using water vapor to further retain the heat that would otherwise reflect off the Earth’s surface back into space. Without these two heat containment systems, our planet would turn into literal frozen wasteland during the night dropping in temperature by hundreds of degrees fahrenheit.
And if I kept going along these lines we would see literally dozens of other elements about our planet and its makeup that would suggest Earth is a system for sustaining life in a way that no other planetary body we’ve ever studied is. Because we can identify a common purpose in the many outputs of our planet time and time again, we increasingly see it as a system, rather than just a chaotic series of circumstances. This is why we continue to refer to more and more elements of Earth as systems but we don’t do this for the moon or Mars. We don’t discuss the systems of Venus. And it’s why we don’t talk about the system of an avalanche.
Now we can understand why ancient people were actually pretty good systems thinkers. They had a decent understanding of the purpose of systems. This is what a strong connection to reality will naturally give us. When we can see how systems behave in the wild so to speak, we tend to get a really strong sense of its purpose. If all someone understood about a system was its purpose, then the other elements of that system become far easier to understand. But, we can take our understanding of systems one step further.
If we all understood the 1st principles of systems, then it would allow us to describe systems using the same concepts. It would serve as a vehicle for simplifying systems thinking. An objective, universal, analogy free, and foundational understanding of the very nature of systems themselves. If we collectively understood that nature then our ability to talk about, understand, and experiment with the interconnected nature of different systems would sky rocket. The natural way in which smaller systems nest within larger systems, the complexity this nesting process, how physically smaller systems are often where the most complexity is found, and on and on. All of this and much more becomes much easier to see and understand the better we understand the true nature of systems themselves. This, I believe, is the first step in taking back humanity’s talent for systems thinking.