I became interested in systems ideas as a result of my experiences as a manager in the 1970s but, as I encountered authors like Fritjof Capra and Ilya Prigogine in the 1980s, my interest expanded. I studied systems ideas with the Open University and Lancaster University, going on later to work as a tutor within the Open University Systems Department.
Quite separately, my wife and I were interested in healthy eating and this led to a general interest in green issues for which systems thinking is ideally suited.
When I became a management consultant, I had many opportunities to explore systems ideas with the individuals, groups and organisations with whom I worked. One fruit of these explorations was an A2 diagram of the development of systems ideas which is here made available within an A1 PDF.
Some systems ideas
- Everything we can think about is a system consisting of interconnected elements and subsystems which are themselves systems.
- A change in any element or subsystem within a system causes changes to other elements and subsystems and thus to the system itself.
- Every system takes in energy, uses some of it to maintain the connections between its elements and subsystems and releases the remaining energy in some form or other.
- The connections between the elements and subsystems within a system tend to break down over time leading to the system no longer being able to process energy or produce outputs.
- Every system oscillates, some so quickly that we cannot see them, some so slowly that they appear stable to us.
- Most systems oscillate within relatively predictable patterns but if a system oscillates so wildly that it goes into overshoot, it can reach a bifurcation which has a random outcome in which a completely new system can be created which could not have been predicted even from full knowledge of the earlier system.
- The creation of such new systems can compensate for the loss of systems which can no longer process energy or produce outputs.
- No system that we can think about exists in an ‘objective’ sense; systems ideas are a way of thinking about the world which yields useful insights into the way in which the world works which enable us to manage our interactions with rest of the world.
The human system
- The human system consists of many physical, emotional, intellectual, social, cultural and spiritual subsystems which all interact. A change in a person's physical subsystems can affect all the other subsystems as can a change in a person's emotional or intellectual subsystems. For example, a person who eats the wrong sort of food or fails to exercise sufficiently may not have the energy to engage in some sorts of activities or may experience greater levels of stress. A person who can see a problem as an opportunity is more likely to reduce the levels of the stress hormones in their bodies and therefore make themselves more able to engage successfully in emotional and social encounters.
- The Descartian mind/body split is a myth. What we think affects our physical subsystems and what is happening in our physical subsystems affects what we think and how we experience things. Similarly, the idea that a human system can exist in isolation is a myth. A human system can only exist if it has sufficient emotional, social, cultural and spiritual connections with other human beings. This does not mean that people cannot survive in isolation for long periods if they already have reserves of emotional. social, cultural and spiritual energy but, in the end, unless these are replenished, they will ultimately cease to be human beings in any meaningful sense.
- From a Christian perspective, this makes sense of the command to ‘Love God and love your neighbour.’ If a human being does not have connections which result in energy exchanges with their emotional, social and spiritual subsystems, those systems will not be able to make as significant a contribution to the human system as they might.
- But you do not have to be a Christian to have a well-functioning spiritual subsystem — just a settled belief system (Williams, David R and Sternthal, Michelle J (2007)‘Spirituality, religion and health: evidence and research directions’ The Medical Journal of Australia 186(10), S47–S50).
Appreciative systems
The former civil servant, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, argued that an important aspect of human systems was their ‘appreciative system’ — the collection of beliefs and values which influenced what they thought was significant and how they would respond to a new event and idea. He argued that this system could evolve depending on the decisions that a human being made in response to an event or idea.
‘Hard’ and ‘Soft’ systems
Peter Checkland coined the term ‘soft’ system to describe human activity systems which he considered could not be subject to the same types of inquiry as an engineering system and developed Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) in order to research such systems. I prefer to distinguish ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems in terms of whether there are any value conflicts surrounding them. If there are no value conflicts in respect of a human activity system, then a ‘hard’ systems approach, such as that outlined in ‘Making things happen,’ can be used.
Dimensions of gender in systems thinking
While a member of the ‘Gender issues in systems thinking group’ in the Yorkshire Region of the Open University, I contributed to an attempt to develop some material for the Open University’s systems thinking courses which, as far as I am aware, was never used.
Using diagrams in systems thinking
Diagrams have been used by many systems thinkers but I became frustrated by the rather indisciplined way in which diagrams were often being used and, in conjunction with Wendy Fisher, a colleague at the Open University, developed a framework for using diagrams in systems thinking which was subsequently published by the Open University.
Being green
Becoming frustrated at people who seemed to think that green environmental and green social aspirations cannot be integrated, I set out in Being green to argue that they are inevitably and intimately connected in any world we are likely to have in the future.