[RC] The Limits to Systems Thinking

[Avesland at aol.com]

 The Limits to Systems Thinking
                     By : Billy   Rojas
 
There is no question about the usefulness  of systems thinking. The issue
might best be put this way :
 
All problems that are necessary for us to  solve are problems of war.
In most cases this principle must be  taken  metaphorically, as in the
phrase, "the war of the sexes," or when  thinking about business or
marketing "campaigns." Yet there is truth  in the observation that politics
is war by other means. War is endemic to  life; or, if not war as such,
the problem of predation. It is not  paranoia to take the view that someone
is always out to get us. Someone always IS  out to get us.
 
Just as we are always out to get someone  else. In less militaristic 
terminology,
we live in a competitive world. Competition  has strong imperatives. We ignore
those imperatives only at our peril. We can  never assume the good will of
others  -with only some specific  classes of exceptions, and not always then,
namely love relationships, friendships, the  relationship of parents to their
children, and relationships within various  religious communities or, in a few
cases, communities based upon some form of  psychotherapy, explicit or
unexpressed. But this seems to exhaust the  list of exceptions.
 
Everything else, the world of business, of  education, of government, of
the law, of sports, of communications, of  the professions, and so forth,
are all competitive, sometimes to near or  real excess. And, given the
characteristics of competition , someone  is, indeed, always out to best
you, to become "one up" on you, to be more  successful, to achieve
more than you, to take resources from you,  even if indirectly. Hence
someone is always out to get you, or, at a  minimum, to get the better
of you. We live in a world of predators, in  other words, fellow human
beings who compete with us every day of our  lives.
 
That predation is mitigated by religion, by  social relationships, by family,
by various elements of culture, is not in  dispute. But all the mitigation in
the world does not change the essential  fact of the matter : In effect, 
we live in a world where war in some form  is forever the normal
condition of our lives.
 
Sometimes this is not metaphorical at all..  Sometimes we need to deal
with military might, with attacks against  us by enemies that seek to kill
us or destroy our society and its values.  Sometimes we need to take
into account the effects of secret wars  waged by intelligence agencies
and counterintelligence operatives.  Sometimes criminal gangs assume
powers that threaten entire communities in  the way that an occupying
army with sinister motives may threaten an  entire population, viz, the
example of the Nazis in WWII, or the North  Korean Communists in
the southern part of the peninsula in the  early 1950s; this is in no way
a reference to Americans in Iraq. But the  fact is that an occupying 
army can be quite oppressive and as   far as the people under occupation
are concerned , they are still at war even  if the front has passed.
 
The Cold War was another example of a real  war, even if there was
no direct military confrontation between  the USA and the USSR.
 
That business resembles war has been the  subject of many books and
serious articles, for instance  :
 
William Peacock's 1984 volume,  Corporate Combat
J. C. Levinson's opus, also from 1984,  Guerilla Marketing.
 
______________________________________________________
 
These introductory remarks were necessary  in order to discuss the origins
and continued development of  systems  thinking. Systems Theory in a 
formal sense only dates to World War II,  when is gave rise to what was
subsequently called Operations Research.  This is pointed out by Bela
Benathy in a recent (possibly 2004 or even  2005) paper distributed on
the Net by the International Society for  the Systems Sciences, The 
Evolution of Systems Inquiry, Part  2.
 
Successfully waging war requires all the  elements we see in any form of
systems anaylsis. Resources must be  obtained, managed to best effect,
with products meant to solve particular  problems  -yet in such a  way
that everything produced can serve other  purposes than those for which
they were originally designed. That is, war  is an evolutionary process. 
The shape of any war is different at the end  than it was at the outset.
 
War is also highly complex. Many different  factors must be taken into
account if a combatant is to have any  chance of winning. Details of every
imaginable description need to be  considered. Effects of one military
action need to be judged in terms of  consequences on other actions.
And all relevant unknowns must be given due  weight. Which is only
to broach the subject. War is  multi-dimensional and complicated.
 
General Systems Theory was one result of  optimism about how well
the West managed WWII, emerging victorious  through a combination
of careful planning, scientific research,  and systematic scheduling. This
frame of mind continued to be important  well into the Cold War era,
with the view common that science would  solve our worst problems if
only we were scientific enough. The view  developed that a science of
sciences, so to speak, ought to provide  sufficient intelligence (knowledge
and its application, rather than the  CIA usage of the word) for us to
deal with the Soviets or their surrogates  and come out on top in the
struggle between competing socio-economic  realms.
 
The epitome of this process was the  publication, in 1968, of Ludwig
von Bertalanffy's magnum opus, General  System Theory.
 
That this book was a contribution to  knowledge goes without saying.
Many of the fundamental concepts of systems  thinking were first
outlined in this book, with some matters  discussed in great detail to
very good effect. However, as Benathy  noted, there were problems 
with the GST approach almost from the  outset.
 
There were major successes too. If not  modeled specifically on
Bertalanffy's outlook, it is scarcely  conceivable that NASA could
have gotten Americans to the Moon without a  systems approach to
the goal of a lunar expedition articulated  by President Kennedy. All
parts of the mega-project had to work  together. An incredibly complex
process had to be time managed, with tens  of thousands of components
brought together at just the right times,  each component defect free.
 
Yet as much as NASA was successful was how  much of a failure was
the other large scale application of  systems theory of that era, namely
the management of the war in Viet Nam. Our  entire country learned a
lesson the hard way. You cannot make a  science out of war no matter
how useful science may be in battlefield  outcomes. 
 
Essentially a major "domain problem" had  been identified  -at great expense
in terms of human casualties , wasted  capital, and the undermining of the
American economy. Some things cannot be  quantified. If the problem
cannot be reduced this simplistically this  principle is nonetheless crucial
to understanding the limits of GST   -and by implication at least some 
other forms of systems  thinking.
 
We tend to personalize the problem of Viet  Nam. Faulty systems thinking
of the 1960s was Robert Mac Namara's fault.  To an extent this was true
enough, but the larger question concerns  why it was that Mac Namara was
able to gain as much influence as he did ,  in the first place. The answer is
that the concept of GST was popular in  decision making circles, not only
at companies like Ford Motors, but also in  the US Government. And on 
Wall Street. GST, for better or for worse,  was an idea whose time had
come. It turned out to be a flawed  theory.
 
Before GST-inspired projects had run their  course, however, there would
be all sorts of derivations from  Bertalanffy's original model. For instance
the concept of social engineering found  supporters, the view that social
groups or organizations could be  micromanaged systematically with little
regard for feedback except "approved"  channels of communication. The
result was mismanagement in just about all  cases where this was tried. This
"militarization" of civilian social  institutions was a disaster. And another
black eye for GST even if Bertalanffy never  had any such thing in mind.
 
Another example of how GST can contribute  to failure concerns the rise
of Futures Research in this same period of  time, although the World Future
Society itself was not organized until late  in the decade.
 
Herman Kahn was making use of a "systems  approach" in his work at the
Hudson Institute early in the 1960s,  indeed, even before in some areas of
interest. And Kahn also made contributions  to knowledge with his theories
about escalation ladders, spiral social  processes (circular developments that
are a little different each time one  arrives again at the presumptive 
starting
point), and foreseeable results derived  from the operation of systems per se.
But the application of these theories to  Viet Nam, not to mention areas like
business and education, proved to be worse  than useless for the most part.
 
Something was dramatically wrong with  General Systems Theory. The serious
problems of GST had to be addressed before  modern forms of systems
thinking could arise. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/centroids_radicalcentrism.com/attachments/20050720/1aafccb9/attachment.html