Systems Thinking

Modern science and the Industrial Growth Society grew up together. With the help of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, classical science veered away from a holistic, organic view of the world to an analytical and mechanical one. The machines we made, to extend our senses and capacities, became our model for the universe. Separating mechanism from operator, object from observer, this view of reality assumed that everything could be described objectively and controlled externally. It has permitted extraordinary technological gains and fueled the engines of industrial progress. But, as twentieth century biologists realized with increasing frustration, it cannot explain the self-renewing processes of life.

Instead of looking for basic building blocks, these life scientists took a new tack: they began to look at wholes instead of parts, at processes instead of substances. They discovered that these wholes--be they cells, bodies, ecosystems, and even the planet itself--are not just a heap of disjunct parts, but dynamically organized and intricately balanced "systems,"  interdependent in every movement, every function, every exchange of energy and information. They saw that each element is part of a vaster pattern, a pattern that connects and evolves by discernible principles.  The discernment of these principles gave rise to general living systems theory.

Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, known as the father of general systems theory, called it a "way of seeing." And while its insights have spread throughout the physical and social sciences, spawning groundbreaking derivative theories, the systems perspective has remained just that – a way of seeing. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson called it "the biggest bite out of the Tree of Knowledge in two thousand years." 

 

By shifting their optic to relationships instead of separate entities, scientists made an amazing discovery– amazing at least to the mainstream western mind. They discovered that nature is self-organizing. Or rather, assuming that to be the case, they set about discerning the principles by which this self-organizing occurs. They found these principles or system properties to be awesomely elegant in their simplicity and constancy throughout the observable universe, from suborganic to biological and ecological systems, and mental and social systems as well.  The properties of open systems which permit the variety and intelligence of life-forms to arise from interactive currents of matter and energy, are four in number.

1. Each system, from atom to galaxy, is a whole. That means that it is not reducible to its components. Its distinctive nature and capacities derive from the interactive relationships between its parts. This interplay is synergistic, generating "emergent properties" and new possibilities, which are not predictable from the character of the separate parts– just as the wetness of water could not be predicted from oxygen and hydrogen before they combined, or just as the tensile strength of steel far exceeds the combined strengths of iron and nickel. This property of open systems challenges the universal applicability of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that corner stone of classical science on which rest notions of entropy, the running down of all life.

2. Despite continual flow-through of matter-energy and information, and indeed thanks to that flow-through, open systems are able to maintain their balance; they self-stabilize. By virtue of this capacity, which von Bertalanffy called fliessgliechgewicht (flux-equilibrium), systems can self-regulate to compensate for changing conditions in their environment. This homeostatic function is performed by registering/monitoring the effects of their own behavior and matching it with their norms, like a thermostat. It is understood as a function of feedback– negative or deviation-reducing feedback, to be precise (also called "cybernetics one"). This is how we maintain our body temperature, heal from a cut, or ride a bicycle.

3. Open systems not only maintain their balance amidst the flux, but also evolve in complexity.  When challenges from their environment persist, they can fall apart or adapt by reorganizing themselves around new, more responsive norms. This too is a function of feedback– positive or deviation-amplifying feedback (also called "cybernetics two"). It is how we learn and how we evolved from the amoeba. But if our changing behaviors are not compatible with the challenges we face, and do not achieve a new balance with them, the positive feedback loop gets out of control and goes into "runaway," leading eventually to systems breakdown.

4. Every system is a "holon"– that is, it is both a whole in its own right, comprised of subsystems, and simultaneously an integral part of a larger system. Thus holons form "nested hierarchies," systems within systems, circuits within circuits, fields within fields. Each new holonic level– say from atom to molecule, cell to organ, person to family– generates emergent properties that are nonreducible to the capacities of the separate components. Far different than the hierarchies of control familiar to societies where rule is imposed from above, in nested hierarchies (sometimes called holonarchies) order tends to arises from the bottom up; the system self-generates from spontaneously adaptive cooperation between the parts, in mutual benefit. Order and differentiation go hand and hand, components diversifying as they coordinate roles and invent new responses.

The mechanistic view of reality separated substance from process, self from other, thought from feeling. In the systems perspective, these dichotomies no longer hold. What appeared to be separate and self-existent entities are now seen to be interdependent.  What had appeared to be "other" can be equally construed as a concomitant of "self", like a fellow-cell in a larger body. What we had been taught to dismiss as mere feelings are responses to our world no less valid than rational constructs. Sensations, emotions, intuitions, concepts: all condition each other, each a way of apprehending the relationships which weave our world.

As systems we participate in the evolving web of life, giving and receiving the feedback necessary for its sustenance, and maintaining integrity and balance by virtue of constant flow-through.  To convey this dynamic process, theorists have used a variety of images. Fire and water are prominent among them. "We are not stuff that abides," says Norbert Wiener, "we are patterns that perpetuate themselves; we are whirlpools in a river of everflowing water." Or we are like a flame, says Leon Brillouin; as a flame keeps its shape by transforming the stuff that flows through it, so do we in the constant metabolisis. To convey the nature of the relationship between open systems, a frequent image is that of nerve cells in a neural net. Systems political scientist Karl Deutsch took it as a model for social as well as biological systems, arguing that free circulation of information is essential to health and survival. By their synergistic interactions neurons differentiate and enhance each other in their diversity. Weaving an ever more responsive and intricate net, they give rise to intelligence.

Click here for a longer article on this subject, describing these invariants in more detail, and exploring their implications for the global crises we face today.

Click here for a paper on the relationships between psychosynthesis and systems theory presented at the AAP Conference, 2003.