Applied Systems Thinking
During the 1950s and 1960s systems thinking had a strong influence on engineering and management, where systems concepts— including those of cybernetics—were applied to solve practical problems. These applications gave rise to the new disciplines of systems engineering, systems analysis, and systemic management. 1
As industrial enterprises became increasingly complex with the development of new chemical, electronic, and communications technologies, managers and engineers had to be concerned not only with large numbers of individual components, but also with the effects arising from the mutual interactions of those components, both in physical and organizational systems. Thus many engineers and project managers in large companies began to formulate strategies and methodologies that explicitly used systems concepts. Passages such as the following were found in many of the books on systems engineering that were published during the 1960s:
The systems engineer must also be capable of predicting the emergent properties of the system, those properties, that is, which are possessed by the system but not its parts. 2
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The method of strategic thinking known as “systems analysis” was pioneered by the RAND Corporation, a military research and development institution founded in the late 1940s, which became the model for numerous “think tanks” specializing in policy making and the brokerage of technology. 3 Systems analysis grew out of operations research, the analysis and planning of military operations during World War II. These included the coordination of radar use with antiaircraft operations, the very same problems that also initiated the theoretical developments of cybernetics.
During the 1950s systems analysis went beyond military applications and became a broad systemic approach to cost-benefit analysis, involving mathematical models to examine a range of alternative programs designed to meet a well-defined goal. In the words of a popular text, published in 1968:
One strives to look at the entire problem, as a whole, in context, and to compare alternative choices in the light of their possible outcomes. 4
Soon after the development of systems analysis as a method for tackling complex organizational problems in the military, managers began to use the new approach to solve similar problems in business. “Systems-oriented management” became a new catchword, and during the 1960s and 1970s a whole series of books on management were published that featured the word “systems” in their titles. 5 The modeling technique of “systems dynamics,” developed by Jay Forrester, and the “management cybernetics” of Stafford Beer are examples of comprehensive early formulations of the systems approach to management. 6
A decade later a similar but much more subtle approach to management was developed by Hans Ulrich at the St. Gallen Business School in Switzerland. 7 Ulrich’s approach is widely known in European management circles as the “St. Gallen model.” It is based on the view of the business organization as a living social system and over the years has incorporated many ideas from biology, cognitive science, ecology, and evolutionary theory. These more recent developments gave rise to the new discipline of “systemic management,” which is now taught at Eu-
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ropean business schools and advocated by management consultants. 8
The Rise of Molecular Biology
While the systems approach had a significant influence on management and engineering during the 1950s and 1960s, its influence on biology, paradoxically, was almost negligible during that time. The 1950s were the decade of the spectacular triumph of genetics, the elucidation of the physical structure of DNA, which has been hailed as the greatest discovery in biology since Darwin’s theory of evolution. For several decades this triumphal success totally eclipsed the systems view of life. Once again the pendulum swung back to mechanism.
The achievements of genetics brought about a significant shift in biological research, a new perspective that still dominates our academic institutions today. Whereas cells were regarded as the basic building blocks of living organisms during the nineteenth century, the attention shifted from cells to molecules toward the middle of the twentieth century, when geneticists began to explore the molecular structure of the gene.
Advancing to ever smaller levels in their explorations of the phenomena of life, biologists found that the characteristics of all living organisms—from bacteria to humans—were encoded in their chromosomes in the same chemical substance, using the same code script. After two decades of intensive research, the precise details of this code were unraveled. Biologists had discovered the alphabet of a truly universal language of life. 9
This triumph of molecular biology resulted in the widespread belief that all biological functions can be explained in terms of molecular structures and mechanisms. Thus most biologists have become fervent reductionists, concerned with molecular details. Molecular biology, originally a small branch of the life sciences, has now become a pervasive and exclusive way of thinking that has led to a severe distortion of biological research.
At the same time, the problems that resist the mechanistic approach of molecular biology became ever more apparent during
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the second half of the century. While biologists know the precise structure of a few genes, they know very little of the ways in which genes communicate and cooperate in the development of an organism. In other words, they know the alphabet of the genetic code but have almost no idea of its syntax. It is now apparent that most of the DNA—perhaps as much as 95 percent—may be used for integrative activities about which biologists are likely to remain ignorant as long as they adhere to mechanistic models.
Critique of Systems Thinking
By the mid-1970s the limitations of the molecular approach to the understanding of life were evident. However, biologists saw little else on the horizon. The eclipse of systems thinking from pure science had become so complete that it was not considered a viable alternative. In fact, systems theory began to be seen as an intellectual failure in several critical essays. Robert Lilienfeld, for example, concluded his excellent account, The Rise of Systems Theory, published in 1978, with the following devastating critique:
Systems thinkers exhibit a fascination for definitions, conceptualizations, and programmatic statements of a vaguely benevolent, vaguely moralizing nature. . . . They collect analogies between the phenomena of one field and those of another . . . the description of which seems to offer them an esthetic delight that is its own justification. . . . No evidence that systems theory has been used to achieve the solution of any substantive problem in any field whatsoever has appeared. 10
The last part of this critique is definitely no longer justified today, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters of this book, and it may have been too harsh even in the 1970s. It could be argued even then that the understanding of living organisms as energetically open but organizationally closed systems, the recognition of feedback as the essential mechanism of homeostasis, and the cybernetic models of neural processes—to name just three examples that were well established at the time—represented major advances in the scientific understanding of life.
However, Lilienfeld was right in the sense that no formal systems theory of the kind envisaged by Bogdanov and Bertalanffy had been applied successfully in any field. Bertalanffy’s goal, to develop his general systems theory into “a mathematical discipline, in itself purely formal but applicable to the various empirical sciences,” was certainly never achieved.
The main reason for this “failure” was the lack of mathematical techniques for dealing with the complexity of living systems. Bogdanov and Bertalanffy both recognized that in open systems the simultaneous interactions of many variables generate the patterns of organization characteristic of life, but they lacked the means to describe the emergence of those patterns mathematically. Technically speaking, the mathematics of their time was limited to linear equations, which are inappropriate to describe the highly nonlinear nature of living systems. 11
The cyberneticists concentrated on nonlinear phenomena like feedback loops and neural networks, and they had the beginnings of a corresponding nonlinear mathematics, but the real breakthrough came several decades later and was linked closely to the development of a new generation of powerful computers.
While the systemic approaches developed during the first half of the century did not result in a formal mathematical theory, they created a certain way of thinking, a new language, new concepts, and a whole intellectual climate that has led to significant scientific advances in recent years. Instead of a formal systems theory the decade of the 1980s saw the development of a series of successful systemic models that describe various aspects of the phenomenon of life. From these models the outlines of a coherent theory of living systems, together with the proper mathematical language, are now finally emerging.
The Importance of Pattern
The recent advances in our understanding of living systems are based on two developments that originated in the late 1970s, during the same years when Lilienfeld and others were writing their critiques of systems thinking. One was the discovery of the new
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mathematics of complexity, which is discussed in the following chapter. The other was the emergence of a powerful novel concept, that of self-organization, which had been implicit in the early discussions of the cyberneticists but was not developed explicitly for another thirty years.
To understand the phenomenon of self-organization, we first need to understand the importance of pattern. The idea of a pattern of organization—a configuration of relationships characteristic of a particular system—became the explicit focus of systems thinking in cybernetics and has been a crucial concept ever since. From the systems point of view, the understanding of life begins with the understanding of pattern.
We have seen that throughout the history of Western science and philosophy there has been a tension between the study of substance and the study of form. 12 The study of substance starts with the question, What is it made of?; the study of form with the question, What is its pattern? These are two very different approaches, which have been in competition with one another throughout our scientific and philosophical tradition.
The study of substance began in Greek antiquity in the sixth century b.c., when Thales, Parmenides, and other philosophers asked: What is reality made of? What are the ultimate constituents of matter? What is its essence? The answers to these questions define the various schools of the early era of Greek philosophy. Among them was the idea of four fundamental elements— earth, air, fire, water. In modern times those were recast into the chemical elements, now more than 100 but still a finite number of ultimate elements out of which all matter was thought to be made. Then Dalton identified the elements with atoms, and with the rise of atomic and nuclear physics in the twentieth century the atoms were further reduced to subatomic particles.
Similarly, in biology the basic elements were first organisms, or species, and in the eighteenth century biologists developed elaborate classification schemes for plants and animals. Then, with the discovery of cells as the common elements in all organisms, the focus shifted from organisms to cells. Finally, the cell was broken down into its macromolecules—enzymes, proteins, amino acids,
MODELS OF SELF-ORGANIZATION