Systems and Systems Thinking

The formal origins of systems theory date back to the middle 20th century and draw from two interconnected [Page 406]threads. There were the physicists and biologists, such as David Bohm and Ludvig von Bertallanfy, and there were the group dynamacists and organizational developers, such as Stafford Beer, Russel Ackoff, Fred Emery, Eric Trist, Reg Revans, and, to some extent, Kurt Lewin.

The basic issue all sought to understand was the relationship between an event and its context: past, present, and future. Although they each took a different route, they built on each other's concepts and established the basis of the rich range of systems approaches that are available today.

From the range of approaches, is it possible to develop some general statements about systems and the properties of systems?

Ackoff's classic definition lists 31 properties of a system. A rather simpler list was developed in the early 1970s by John Beishon and Geoff Peters at the Open University in the United Kingdom: A system is an assembly of parts wherein

• The parts or components are connected together in an organized way
• The parts or components are affected by being in the system and are changed by leaving it
• The assembly does something
• The assembly has been identified by someone as being of special interest

Around that time, Peter Checkland at the University of Lancaster, United Kingdom, developed the following list of essential properties of a system:

• An ongoing purpose (which may be determined in advance—purposeful—or assigned through observation—purposive)
• A means of assessing performance
• A decision-taking process
• Components that are also systems (i.e., the notion of subsystems)
• Components that interact
• An environment (with which the system may or may not interact)
• A boundary between the system and the environment (that may be closed or open)
• Resources
• Continuity

These definitions are relatively old, and the systems field has broadened considerably since they were formulated. Nevertheless, they still provide a good base from which to understand the fundamental nature of systems and systems-based inquiry. Thirty years on, their main disadvantage is that they promote the idea that a system is always an observable concrete “thing” (e.g., a manufacturing supply chain) rather than the possibility that a system may be an assembly of concepts, ideas, and beliefs.

Systems Thinking: Using Systems Concepts

In using systems concepts, there are several traps for the unwary. A common notion of systems-based inquiry is that it must include everything. In fact it is quite the opposite—the power of systems inquiry is that it seeks to simplify, not make more complicated. Its job is to get to the essence of what is going on, not end up with some behemoth. Producing a movie is an enormously complicated undertaking, but Charlie Chaplain once said that all he needed to make a comedy was “a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.” Essence—drawing simplicity from the complicated and choosing what can be usefully and feasibly left out—is the major feature of systems-based inquiry.

Like the concept of evaluation, the concept of system has both a popular and a technical meaning. The popular meaning, as in “the health system” or “recruitment system,” conjures up images of interconnected management processes. This tends to encourage the conception of systems as a series of boxes with arrows or lines between them. In evaluation language, systems are fancy program logics. Not so—or not only so. Unfortunately, when we assess these popular notions of system using the technical systems tools described later, we often find that the popular concept of system gets very fuzzy. For instance, a single recruitment system can have many environments, many purposes, many boundaries. In short, the socalled recruitment system is not a system at all but (to use some technical systems terms) a “rich picture,” a “problematique” or a “mess.”

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