systems thinking

Planted Dec 2020 Tended 4 years ago Linked from 29 notes

Contents

Systems thinking (or “systems theory”) is a way of understanding phenomena by looking at the systems they’re a part of. For example, a non-systems-thinking approach to public health might look only at biology to understand obesity, and identify the cause within individuals consuming too many calories and getting too little exercise. A solution resulting from that approach—which might encourage healthier eating or more exercise—is likely to fail because it doesn’t account for the broader systems and factors at play (all 108 of them!). Perhaps some individuals don’t have access to healthy food due to food deserts, or could bike to work if only there were bike lanes. Like many human phenomena, obesity is at the nexus of physiological, psychological, social, environmental, and economic systems. If we want to change some state of the world, we have to understand the systems that gave rise to and continue to maintain it.

Because the world comprises systems embedded within systems embedded within systems and so on, it’s always possible to “zoom out” and examine any phenomenon or system within a wider context.

Feedback Loops

feedback are mechanisms by which the present state of a system influences the future state of the system.

Comparison with Reductivism

Systems thinking is holistic in that it seeks to understand the behavior of parts by looking at the whole. The opposite approach is called reductivism, which seeks to understand systems by examining the behavior of their parts. Both paradigms can be useful, but reductivism—despite being the dominant paradigm in the sciences for hundreds of years—is fundamentally incomplete. Systems are more than the sum of their parts, as the discovery of emergent behavior has shown.

In Practice

  • As noted in Thinking in Systems, the behavior of a system can often be modeled as stocks and flows.

Resources