Systems Thinking in a nutshell
Big topic. Small read
Updated: 22 October 2020
What is Systems Thinking?
I’ll be open 😊 When I first start to research an area for one of my ‘in a nutshell’ blogs I often start with the Wikipedia article. For “systems thinking” there is no Wikipedia entry (it redirects to “systems theory”). I’m taking this as a little bit of license to draw a reasonably wide boundary around the definition of systems thinking and borrowing a phrase from W Edwards Deming I’m defining systems thinking simply as:
an appreciation of the system as an interconnected whole
Notice I did not phrase this as ‘an understanding of the system as a whole’ — this is one of the tenets of system’s thinking; a complex adaptive system cannot be fully understood by a single person.
What is a system?
A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know the storm runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Century business) (p. 6). Random House.
Systems then come in all shapes and sizes. The rainstorm described above is a system. So too is the process by which we fill a glass of water (more on this later). Macro economics and managing the household budget, all systems.
The best definition of a system in the context of System Thinking I have come across is given by Russ Ackoff:
A system is a whole that consists of inter-dependent parts, each of which can affect the system’s behavior or its properties.
As Adam Walls has it, systems are constantly changing and being changed, therefore they can never be totally known or understood. Diagnosis and making sense of them is therefore required.
Peter Senge ‘s The Fifth Discipline
Much, perhaps I could even go as far as saying most, of the Systems Thinking body of knowledge comes from American systems scientist Peter Senge and his classic work ‘The Fifth Discipline’. This book promotes the concept of the learning organization and details the five disciplines required to move an organization towards becoming a learning organization. The fifth of these disciplines is Systems Thinking, which underpins the other four:
Six key tenets of Systems Thinking:
1. There is no system
Perhaps an odd principle to kick off a list of systems thinking tenets: this principle speaks to the fact that a system is ultimately a grouping of components, and like beauty, a group is in the eye of the beholder. Take the example of a car, a system of parts — the engine, gear box, seats, radio etc. This seems like a cut and dry example of a closed, bounded system. But consider the tyres … are they part of the system? Certainly, without the tyres the car wouldn’t be able to serve its purpose. But what about the road? Surely the road is essential — the tyres serve little purpose without a road. And going event further, if we consider the road a part of the system, what about the system that produces roads — the local council, or country government. And the people that work at this institution, their hopes dreams and ambitions, these all make a difference to the amount and quality of available roading. And so on.
Of course it is helpful for us as people to align on the groups that comprise a system. Without a similar concept of the components that make up a car conversations about how to drive to the airport would be very confusing. The principles that follow use ‘system’ in this sense of a commonly agreed boundary.
2. The system is more than the sum of its parts
When we try to get our heads around a complex area, we often employ analysis, a word which comes from the Greek meaning a breaking up or an untying. In this sense, no amount of analysis will help us understand a system, the system can only be fully appreciated in its entirety. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
Russ Ackoff makes the point that a system has properties as a whole that none of its parts have individually. Lets take an example of possibly the most complex system on earth … you! A human being is a collection of parts; the brain, the eye, the stomach, the hand and so on. And yet a person is so much more than the sum of individual body parts. Your eye cannot see, you can see. Your hand cannot write, you can write. This last point as Russ Ackoff dryly observes is easy to demonstrate — cut off your hand as see what it does!
3. The system is bigger than your part in the system
To illustrate the point that the system goes beyond the part we play in the system Peter Senge outlines a game he calls The Beer Game. The game consists of three players in the game including a retailer, a wholesaler, and a marketing director at a brewery. Each player’s goal is to maximize profit. The more each player strives to optimize their part of the system, the more the system as a whole is bent out of shape; as the players react to the system changes, more distortions are created and so the cycle repeats— resulting in a ‘bullwhip effect’.
The system in a way can be thought of as a living entity, with an active ‘will’ — the will to maintain the system. The more force is applied against the system’s desired state, the more counter pressure is exerted. “I fought the law and the law won” as The Clash have it.
4. See the system
Working within a system we build up our own mental model of that system and many times that model is wrong. Three quotes from The Fifth Discipline on this point:
There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality.
Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Conversely, learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
The essence of the discipline of systems thinking lies in a shift of mind: seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and seeing processes
The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Century business). Random House.
5. Reacting to an event without an understanding of the wider system can have unwelcome consequences
Linear thinking, the thinking of direct cause and effect is unhelpful not least because it gives rise to blame based thinking. When something adverse happens, our immediate reaction is often to attempt to locate the cause and to apply a fix. However this “fix” will have effects of its own, and very often these are not positive ones. Consider an example from corporate life: sales decline. Linear thinking could run along the lines of: “sales are declining because our salespeople are not motivated”, and the “fix’ to introduce or strengthen sales-based incentives. However such incentives will then drive all kinds of unexpected and possibly unwanted behavior.
A reaction to something adverse is often to apply a ‘compensating system’ –a process that seeks to address perceived shortcomings in another process. Lets take an example from the world of software — a poor or failed release. We could set up a “release process” to attempt to de-risk releases going forward. However this new compensating process will itself drive behaviors, some of which may not be desired. For example software teams may stop investigating practices such as Continuous Delivery because the perceived need to change is no longer there. By masking the pain of poor processes, continuous improvement energy is dissipated.
“Shifting the burden” structures show that any long-term solution must, as natural resource expert and writer Donella Meadows says, “strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens.”
6. The system can be modeled
Building on techniques such the “feedback” concepts of cybernetics and in “servo-mechanism” engineering theory dating back to the nineteenth century, Senge introduces a simple way of modelling a system. Systems are modeled as a duality of reinforcing feedback (which serves to accelerate change) and balancing feedback (which serves to resist the reinforcing feedback).
For example, the very simple system by which a glass of water is filled, can be modeled as a series of states, with the desired water level balancing the reinforcing feedback the open faucet creates.
