Some notes on the different types of systems thinking.
“In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements.” Russell L. Ackoff (quoted by Steven Shorrock)
Traditional control and communications theory
Wiener
Meadows
Weinberg
Gall
Forrester
- Russell L. Ackoff
- W. Ross Ashby
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy
- Stafford Beer
- W. Edward Deming
- Jay Wright Forrester
- John Gall
- Peter Senge
- Norbert Wiener
- Donella Meadows
- Virginia Satir
- Gerald M. Weinberg
The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Feb., 1979), pp. 93-104
This paper is a criticism of the state of operations research. Notably, this is where Ackoff introduces his idea of messes:
Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.
(Taken directly from the last section of the paper).
- There is a greater need for decision-making systems that can learn and adapt effectively than there is for optimizing systems that cannot.
- In decision making, account should be taken of aesthetic values - stylistic preferences and progress towards ideals - because they are relevant to quality of life.
- Problems are abstracted from systems of problems, messes. Messes require holistic treatment. They cannot be treated effectively by decomposing them analytically into separate problems to which optimal solutions are sought.
- OR's analytic problem-solving paradigm, "predict and prepare," involves internal contradictions and should be replaced by a synthesizing planning paradigm such as "design a desirable future and invent ways of bringing it about."
- Effective treatment of messes requires interaction of a wide variety of disciplines, a requirement that OR no longer meets.
- All those who can be affected by the output of decision making should either be involved in it so they can bring their interests to bear on it, or their interests should be well represented by researchers who serve as their advocates.
contextually naive, Machine Age, analysis, elements, reductionism, determinism, cause and effect, producer-product, self-control, humanization, environmentalization, synthetic, systems thinking, holism, expansionism, control, automation, optimization, objectivity, aesthetics, rationality, meands, ends, intrinsic, extrinsic, traits, style, messes, predicting the future, preparing for the future, design, invention, stakeholders
First, practitioners decreasingly took problematic situations as they came, but increasingly sought, selected, and disorted them so that favoured techniques could be applied to them.
Now, the nature of the situations [OR] faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.
[T]here is a greater need for decision-making systems that can learn and adapt quickly and effectively in rapidly changing situations than there is for systems that produce optimal solutions that deteriorate with change.
Because messes are systems of problems, the sum of the optimal solution to each component problem taken separately is not an optimal solution to the mess.
Managers do not solve problems: they manage messes.
Nature and the world are not organized as science and universities are. There are no physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even Operational Research problems. These are names of different points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal fruitfulness.
Progress in handling messes, as well as problems, derives at least as mmuch from creative reorganization of the way we pursue knowledge and the knowledge we already have as it does from new discoveries.
[An introduction to cybernetics](http://documents.irevues.inist.fr/bitstream/handle/2042/30159/XX_CNE-LIPSOR_000704.pdf?sequence=1**
This book introduces Ashby's law of requisite variety.
- LOOPY: a tool for thinking in systems
- Systems Thinking for Global Problems course by Steve Easterbrook at U.Toronto