A man called Peter Senge nails it when he said, “It’s a crumby word, it’s a non-evocative word”. He was talking about his lifelong obsession with systems thinking.
Families, cars, forests, the human body; all operate on the basis of systems thinking, which is nothing but stepping back and seeing an interconnected whole. “Even before I got to MIT as an undergraduate,” Senge said, “I studied engineering because it was a good way to learn about systems…”
In his seventies, Senge is the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, a senior lecturer at MIT, and the author of the classic text, The Fifth Discipline.
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He gets into the two colloquial meanings of the term system. “One is often when people express helplessness: ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, it’s the stupid system!’ The other common one is to refer to technology, as in, ‘Hey we got a problem, we need a systems expert to fix it’. None of which talks about systems thinking or systems understanding or particularly, systems education.”
Systems Thinking, Senge says, really is about interdependence, how we embrace the extraordinary level of interconnectedness or interdependence that exists among the living. A forest is imponderable. No one can tell you how a forest works. It’s a profoundly complex system.
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Consider what another giant in the field Russell Ackoff had to say. The late American organisational theorist has two points of view at the core of his belief in systems thinking.
One, he said, you can’t improve the performance of the parts of a system taken separately and assume that that will necessarily improve the performance of the whole. Think of a car.
He writes that, “Doing so can destroy an organisation, as is apparent in an example I have used ad nauseum: Installing a Rolls Royce engine in a Hyundai can make it inoperable. This explains why benchmarking has almost always failed.”
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Two, he says, problems are not disciplinary in nature. He gives a great example in one of his talks about someone being faced with a problem of a slow elevator in an office building, that was testing the patience of employees, who had to wait for nearly three minutes after pressing the call button.
How could these complaints be dealt with? The company consulted experts. An architect had a different solution than the engineer, who had a different solution from the electrician, and so on. But the best, simplest solution came from a kid not limited by thinking in terms of only one discipline.
He figured it wasn’t a mechanical problem or a design flaw, and that employees were just bored waiting for the elevator. The problem would dissolve if mirrors were placed in waiting areas in front of the elevator so that people, in the time it took for the elevator to arrive, could look at themselves and others in the reflection. Time wouldn’t crawl, and the mirrors would cost a fraction of the estimate for upgrading elevators.
This is what Ackoff meant when he said, “Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary. Systems thinking is holistic; it attempts to derive understanding of parts from the behaviour and properties of wholes, rather than derive the behaviour and properties of wholes from those of their parts. Disciplines do not constitute different parts of reality; they are different aspects of reality. The whole can be understood only by viewing it from all the perspectives simultaneously.”
These organisational theories are grasped even by 6-year-olds. If they’re taught it in schools, it would shape their approach to life. It’s important to think of the benefits of operating within a framework of systems thinking, teaching the future workforce to look at things from all angles, not just magnify one component of an issue.
Coming back to Senge, in one of his talks on ‘Systems Thinking in a Digital World’, he says something that most of us can agree with. “Family is often quite puzzling and difficult dynamic of a human or social system.”
One of the most interesting fields in the last 20-30 years, he says, is Systems Family Therapy or Structural Family Therapy, which basically means, instead of looking at a problematic teenager, look at the larger mom-and-dad system, and how everyone reacts. It’s about embracing interdependence at all levels.
Our lives have a huge interconnectedness with the rest of the world. Senge illustrates the systems worldview with an example of how our actions affect the planet.
“Travel in northern India, you’ll see the river systems are dry all year around. Why is that? Didn’t used to be. Big canals don’t have water any time of the year. It’s important to think about this. All those river systems originate in the Himalayas, the Tibetan plateau. As the glaciers contract, the river systems become smaller. Why are those glaciers contracting? Global warming, yes, and why is that happening? Because of burning coal.”
He goes on to explain what coal has to do our cell phones. “You’re charging your sophisticated fancy devices. But the most common source of fuel for charging is coal. We don’t look at the whole system, we look at a small piece closest to us. How much of all our electricity is used to work all our devices, the internet? What is the electricity footprint of the internet? We spend much more money in terms of energy and fossil fuels to power our gadgets than to power our homes, and it’s growing much more rapidly. And that’s what it means to look at the entire system.”
Senge went on to explain, “One more way the wealthy are imposing themselves on the poor. Who has dry river beds? It’s the 150 chronically dehydrated people. Northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and this causes social turmoil… how can we not think this is not relevant for education? It makes a big impact on how our society works. Water is the most acute problem in the world. By the year 2030, China and India will be unable to meet 50 percent of their water needs, according to figures provided by the World Health Organisation.
It makes sense to train students early on to view the world through the complete lens. We’ve got to integrate approaches, not box disciplines, and keep them sequestered. As Senge says, it’s how we live that is the problem, not our innate capabilities.
