Tag: systems thinking

Posted on

A Short Discussion on “Senate Adopts Resolution Declaring ‘The Press Is Not the Enemy of the People'”

“Senate Unanimously Passes Resolution Declaring the press Is Not the Enemy of the People”

View Video Here

It would be nice if Congress would take more stands like this, but I think this action is superficial and all too politically safe.

I’m getting to the point where I think the whole system has become pathological (and Democrats are equally responsible for what’s happening). And, by the “whole system,” I really mean multiple systems (political, economic, educational, social, etc.). And, electing new people isn’t going to fix it. There might be a temporary shift, but we are collapsing (along with most other societies).

We (almost all people) have been “trained” to think in linear ways, where cause and effect are simplistic and blame is easy to assign. But, living systems are complex (they don’t operate according to simplistic linear rules and processes). Thinking that blames Trump or even the Republicans for our ills is way too simplistic. The current situation has arisen and continues due to a multiplicity of interacting systems. Capitalism and the rise of neoliberalism are big contributing factors. The systemic dumbing down of children through public schooling since the mid/late 1800’s is another factor, along with the mechanistic approaches to education that have prevented the learning of flexible, creative, and critical thinking. And, we can see how the social system has been created to respond to fear and anger, while maintaining an animal realm nose-to-the-ground existence. We can go on talking about how all of these systems interact and reinforce one another, but it’s too much to cover here.

The big characteristic of complex systems is that they are self-maintaining. At this point, the cluster of interacting systems has “learned” to maintain itself in generally the way we are seeing them manifest. Let’s say we elect a great Democratic president and Congress, we may notice a shift in certain characteristics, but the underlying patterns of money, power, and control will remain, just as they have for many decades. And, then as global warming continues to increase exponentially, the population continues to grow beyond the limits of resources that can maintain the population, and people (including millions of North Americans) are driven from their homes from these previously mentioned conditions, the deeply embedded patterns of reacting with fear and aggression comes storming back into the social-political-educational-economic-etc. contexts, and we get politicians who will be even worse than the ones we have now. And then, I suspect everything starts to collapse… and this is probably within the next decade or two.

It seems to me that the only things we can do to prevent a total collapse involve:

  • not creating divisions between people, but getting everyone to begin caring for and supporting one another and working together;
  • changing the way we think by moving from the linear and simplistic cause and effect ways of thinking to complex systems thinking; and
  • not depending on politicians and governments to “solve” the problems, but working with others in the liminal spaces between institutions to explore ways of dealing with the big issues we’re facing.
Posted on

Beyond Systems Thinking… Climbing Out of Boxes & Breaking Arrows

For years, I’ve been troubled by my own and others’ representations of systems thinking. I’m a visual thinker. I love diagrams. In fact, I’ve driven my students nuts with complicated diagrams of one thing or another, which make some kind of sense to me, but have usually left my students perplexed at best. Even though I thought these diagrams made some kind of sense to me, they were usually a feeble attempt to represent something that diagrams just couldn’t represent. How do you represent inquiry, systems thinking, pattern thinking, creative thinking, creative thinking, critical thinking, or any kind of thinking, for that matter, with a diagram? In fact, how can you represent any kind of complex set of systems with a diagram? Yes, it is tempting. I have tried. And, I am always left with an uneasiness that just feels dishonest… like I’m lying to myself.

As Nora Bateson* has been discussing recently, the entire concept of “systems” is problematic. Part of the problem is the cumbersome quality of our language and the baggage certain words carry despite the meaning one might attribute to a word. So, while I might have a specific meaning for “system,” no matter what I say or do, the meanings that are commonly associated with this word are going to pop into people’s heads despite what I or anyone else has to say. So, when we think of “systems,” we typically think of mechanical systems, such as a bicycle, or some other system that has been represented as an isolated, mechanical system. Ever since Rene Descartes, we have formalized our relationship to the world around us as that of a mechanical system. The human body was seen as a mechanical system. The biological—ecological world was seen as a mechanical system. This view of the world was very convenient and very powerful. However, this view has brought us to the precipice of environmental collapse, in part because this mechanical systems approach has some rather severe limitations. One of these limitations is that the systems are stuck within themselves and that even though they may operate in cycles, they operate in linear sequences with predictable sets of feedback loops and sets of consequences. Such a “mechanistic” view is very neat and tidy, and incredibly comforting. Everything is predictable, until, of course, it isn’t.

It’s what we call “complex systems” that are characteristic of living systems, there are no neat and tidy sequences of predictable outcomes. At best, there may be a probabilistic set of outcomes, say if you take an antibiotic for a particular infection, but there is no guarantee. And, there are all kinds of other things that can occur of which we have no immediate awareness, such as bacteria encoding their genome against the antibiotic or against a similar antibiotic in anticipation of one as yet to be developed.

As much as we’ve tried to represent ecosystems with boxes and arrows, we’ve never been able to represent the complexity of these systems, which in part is due to the fact that they do not have clear boundaries. In fact, the boundaries are not just the physical boundaries of where the lake ecosystem ends and the forest ecosystem begins (not just because they are integrally interconnected), but also the boundaries with the economy, societies, cultures, industries, agriculture, educational institutions, and all kinds of other human activities. We can’t isolate what we call “systems” into sets of boxes and arrows. Such boxes and arrows cannot capture the complex sets of relationships and their ever-changing dynamics. Such attempts are throw-backs to mechanistic systems.

When I’ve poke around looking at what schools are doing with “systems thinking,” all I find is pages of rubrics and pages of boxes and arrows. At the same time, all of the content is based on very simplistic approaches to “systems thinking” based on closed circuits that are cut off from other relevant “systems.” Our attempts to unclutter and simplify only serve to “stupidify” the whole approach for our children. They deserve better. I think that we as adults assume children cannot handle the complexity, so we try to simplify everything, even under the guise of a more “rigorous systems thinking approach.” But, children can and do think in more complex ways. We just perpetuate the cycle of dumbing down with boxes and arrows. We really need to move “beyond systems thinking” to get at the dynamics of the interactions and relationships that make up our living world.

As Nora and Gregory Bateson have suggested, maybe the arts are keys to ways to represent systems, rather than the mathematical and engineering approaches of boxes and arrows. Maybe we need children to translate their understandings of systems in to plays, poetry, paintings, dance, music, video, photography, sculpture, and so forth. Maybe there are other ways of communicating that can capture the dynamics and uncertainties of the ways living things interact. And, maybe children are the ones who can devise just such ways of communicating.

* Nora Bateson discusses this problem with systems thinking and the representation of systems thinking in two recent papers:

  • Bateson, N. (submitted). Symmathesy: Proposing a new word that refers to living systems.
  • Bateson, N. (2015, August). Living systems are learning systems. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Berlin.