System Thinking Paradigm

SYSTEM THINKING PARADIGM

Systems innovation can be seen to be based upon the premise that the system we are interested in is not functioning. On a foundational level or a vision of how the whole system could be better. When we extrapolate this out we can recognize that many of the systems in our society and economy are not functioning as they could. We often hear the word broken associated with health care or educational systems. There is widespread recognition to the unsustainability of many systems such as how we do food production to how we manufacture retail and use consumer goods. This leads us to the conclusion that maybe there's something not quite right about this whole set of systems that make up our economies.

Once one comes to this insight one is then invariably driven to make some inquiry about why and what might be done about it. A superficial inquiry would lead us to the conclusion that whoever is managing these systems is just doing a bad job. If we could just replace those people and get the good guys in charge then all would be fine again but a more prolonged and sustained inquiry would lead us to question the structure of the system. These actors are within if we sustain our inquiry even farther we may come to the recognition that how we design and manage these systems. It is a product of the models we hold about the way the world is and more broadly our processes of reasoning that go into the decisions.

We make this is the conclusion that systems thinkers typically come to that the way we organize our world is a product of the models that we use and if there is something fundamentally dysfunctional with our organizations. Then it is unlikely to be out there but instead a product of our reasoning and modelling. The imbalances in the world are typically traced back to imbalances in our reasoning the position. That an excess of a particular mode of reasoning called analytical reductionism has resulted in an imbalance to how we understand design and manage our world.

Synthetic holism and analytical reductionism. It is important to understand these two modes of reasoning as much of what is talked about in systems and complexity theory follow from them. Analytical reductionism is a process of reasoning where we try to understand something by removing it from its environment decomposing it into individual parts studying the properties of those parts and then putting them back together. So as to derive an account of the whole as some combination of these individual building blocks. It is based upon the assumption that the system is nothing more than the sum of its parts and that the system is relatively closed in contrast synthetic holism is a process of reasoning where we try to understand something by looking at it in relation to the whole system or environment that it forms part of its interaction with other systems and how it is shaped by those interactions in the overall context.