What is Systems Thinking?
Systems thinking is a methodology for grasping complex phenomena and problems as a whole by understanding related elements and interactions, analyzing the behavior of the entire system and the causes of problems, and deriving remedial measures. Systems Thinking is a methodology to understand phenomena and problems more deeply by viewing things not as single elements or parts, but as a “system” that functions through the interaction of multiple elements and parts, and by grasping the whole picture.
As an example of the importance of “thinking as a system,” there used to be a “problem” of people being bitten by hanyus on Amami Oshima Island, and to solve this problem, mongooses were brought to the island and released, but instead of fighting for their lives with hanyus, they fed on other weak animals, which did not reduce the number of hanyus, and the natural monument The mongoose, however, instead of risking their lives to fight the hubs, fed on other weaker animals.
This true story shows that because natural and social systems are intricately connected, taking only a part of them out of the picture may not only fail to produce the desired effect, but may also create new problems. To avoid such a situation, “systems thinking” is to collect as many related items as possible, think of them as a “system,” and analyze them.
Furthermore, by analyzing various systems, we can understand the characteristics and personalities of the systems themselves, as well as points to be aware of, and by working not at the “event” level, which is only the tip of the iceberg, but at the “structure” of the system and the “mental model” and “meta model” that lie deep within it, we can solve various problems more effectively. By working on the “structure” of the system and its inner “mental models” and “meta-models,” we can solve various problems more effectively.
Instead of being caught up in the “event” in front of us and reacting to it in a backward way, it is important to consider what kind of major trend the event is part of and what kind of structure is creating that trend, and to recognize it. This is also an important approach when considering machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, the theme of this blog.
In order to look at things from a systemic perspective, as mentioned above, one should not only look at the event in front of one’s eyes, but by connecting the various related information behind the event or situation, one can gain insight into how to understand the system, what characteristics it has, and what to pay attention to. and what features to look out for.
Systems thinking has the following specific characteristics.
- To view complex phenomena and problems as systems
- To understand the elements and interactions within a system
- To understand the behavior of the system as a whole
- To find the cause of the problem in the elements and interactions within the system
- To consider remedial measures for the system as a whole
Systems thinking includes a variety of techniques for the study of various types of systems. In nature, an example of an object of systems thinking is an ecosystem that contains diverse elements that interact with each other, for example, air, water, plants, and animals. In terms of an organization, a system consists of people, structures, and processes that function to make the organization healthy or unhealthy. Systems engineering is a field that uses systems thinking to design, build, operate, and maintain complex engineering systems. There is also the discipline of systems dynamics, which uses computer models and simulation-based analysis.
Systems thinking and its relationship to the SDGs
Thinking in Systems was written by Donella Meduz, a systems modeling researcher, who completed a draft of the book in 1993, the manuscript was not published at that time and circulated among her peers for several years, but Donella passed away suddenly in 2001 without ever seeing the book completed and It was then published.
Back in 1972, Donnella was also involved in the publication of the book “Limits to Growth. This book, which was the beginning of the SDGs, was published in 1972 and was a compilation of studies using system dynamics methods.
The content of the book warns that “if current trends such as population growth and environmental pollution continue, growth on the planet will reach its limits within 100 years,” and one of the most famous sentences in the book is “People increase in geometric series, but food increases only in arithmetic series. This is a chronological statement. This is based on the concept that people increase in a chronological order by “multiplication” as children are born and their children have more children, while food can only be produced once a year in the same quantity on a given piece of land, in other words, by “addition”. The limit to the amount of crops per unit area means that the amount of crops cannot keep up with the increase in population, and humanity will always suffer from poverty.
In other words, “Limits to Growth” is a book that warns of how the earth can be destroyed if unsustainable patterns are left as they are, and that in order to avoid such disastrous results, “we must change the way we look at the world and the systems that make it up. The book is “The World Runs on Systems. Based on them, it is widely accepted today that “systems thinking is an essential tool in confronting the many environmental, political, social, and instrumental issues we face around the world.
Systems thinking can be a means of solving a wide variety of problems that we face in our daily lives, as well as the social issues represented by the SDGs. For example, when examining business rules and incentives that promote or hinder the development of new technologies using systems thinking methods, one may find “goals that slip away,” or when examining issues in various decision-making situations, “system resistance” may become apparent.
In order to examine the behavior of a system that deviates from the desired goals and to make changes, it is important to analyze the structure of the system and look for “leverage points” for change. When we think about systems, the larger the objects they represent, the more jumbled, crowded, connected, interdependent, and difficult to understand they become. It is easier to understand a system if there are many viewpoints to analyze it, not just one.
Systems thinking allows us to regain our intuition about the system as a whole and allows us to
- Develop the ability to understand the parts.
- See the interconnections.
- Ask the question, “What if ~?” about possible future behavior. Ask the question, “What if?
- Creatively redesign systems.
- Use their insights to make a difference in themselves and in the world.
An anecdote (an old Sufi story) is given here as an example.
There is a city where all the people are blind, and one day when an elephant came to the city, the inhabitants of the city (who did not know what the elephant looked like or what it looked like), groping blindly, touched some part of the elephant and gathered information from it. Then everyone thought, “I know what I know. Because I can feel a part of it. The man who could reach the elephant’s ear said, “It’s big and rough. It’s wide and spread out, like a carpet. The man who touched the elephant’s nose said, “I know what it is. It’s like a straight, hollow pipe. It’s awesome and destructive. Every man touched one of the many parts, but none of them captured the elephant the right way.”
This story teaches a simple but often overlooked lesson: “You can’t tell how a system is going to behave just by knowing the elements that make it up.
What is a system?
As can be imagined above, a system is a series of interconnected components that are organized in a coherent manner to accomplish something. From this definition, we can see that a system is composed of three types of things: “elements,” “interconnections,” and “functions” or “purposes.
A system is a set of individual elements such as a human body, a soccer team, a school, a company, or a city that are interconnected with each other and have a function or purpose. Conversely, a “non-system” is a mishmash of something that has no interconnection or function. Sand scattered on the street, whether added or removed, is still sand on the street and “not a system.
When we think about systems, it is the elements of a system that are easiest to notice. This is because many of the elements can be seen and touched. The elements that make up a tree include “roots,” “trunk,” “branches,” and “leaves,” and if we look more closely, we can see specialized “cells,” “tubes” that carry sap, and “chlorophyll. We can also continue with the “buildings,” “students,” “professors,” “administrators,” “libraries,” “books,” and “computers” that make up the system we call a university, and all of these things can be further described as “what it is made of.
Another thing that may be very important to the system is the “Formless Element”. This is “pride in school,” “academic talent,” etc. If you begin to enumerate these elements of the system and then break them down into sub-elements of one system and then into further sub-elements, the work is almost endless, and in doing so, you will soon lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, “you see the trees and you don’t see the forest.
In systems thinking, before going too far in this direction, we stop decomposing the elements and take the approach of searching for “connections,” in other words, the relationships that connect the elements. For example, the “connections” in a system called a tree would be the physical flows and chemical reactions that affect the metabolic processes of that tree. Such signals allow one part of the system to respond to what is happening in another part.
To be specific to the tree’s system, on a sunny day, the leaves lose water and the water pressure in the water-carrying tubes decreases, thereby causing the roots to ingest more water. In defeat, when the roots experience soil desiccation, the decrease in water pressure signals the leaves to close their pores and prevent them from cowing more of the precious water.
Some system connections are physical flows, such as those described above, but many are information flows (signals that reach the places in the system where decisions and actions are made and taken). These types of connections are often difficult to see, but they become visible when analyzing the system.
An example of this is when considering the system of a university: the connections between “criteria for admission,” “degree requirements,” “examinations and grading,” “budget and money flow,” “gossip,” etc., and the purpose of the system as a whole: the transmission of knowledge. The function and purpose of the system may not be explicitly spoken, written, or expressed, but even in such cases it can be inferred by observing how the system behaves.
If one frog turns to the right and catches a fly, and the child in turn turns to the left and catches a fly, then the frog’s objective is related to catching flies, not to turning to the right or left, and the government talks about being “interested in environmental protection,” but invests little money or effort toward that objective Then, in fact, environmental protection is not a government objective.
The purpose of a system is not necessarily a human purpose, nor is it necessarily intended by some entity within that system. In fact, one of the glitchy aspects of a system is that the combined objectives of the subordinate constituent units result in behavior that no one wants as a whole. No one wants to create a society of drug addiction and crime, but the combination of the goals of the parties involved and the resulting behavior can lead to such a direction.
There are also cases where a system is nested within a system, and as a result, a purpose within a purpose.
An approach to understanding system behavior
Several tools are proposed to show how the system can be observed from different perspectives.
- Pattern Graph of Time Series Change (Behavior Over Time; BOT)
Draw a line graph of the patterns of the major elements of the system (e.g., targeted outputs, inputs, volume of activities, capital and resources, impacts, etc.) from the past to the present and into the future. For the elements of particular interest, draw multiple patterns, such as “desired pattern” and “as-is pattern” toward the future. When conducting quantitative analysis, this chart is used to examine the quantitative level of the system, going back and forth between the loop diagram and other system diagrams.
This is a tool for finding interactions (feedback loops) among elements by listing the main elements of the system and the elements that affect and are affected by them, and connecting the cause-and-effect relationships among the elements with arrows, as to why “the pattern that has been occurring” and “the pattern that remains the same” occurs. Once the pattern that is occurring is explained and a loop diagram is drawn that is acceptable to all involved, it can be used to deepen understanding through dialogue and to explore effective ways to work together.
The system prototype will represent a typical “type” of problem structure that is common across disciplines. It is used in the initial stages of drawing a complex loop diagram to get an idea of what feedback loops are involved based on the patterns and stories that are occurring. In “The Learning Organization,” even without the use of loop diagrams, this look-through tool is also used for the purpose of encouraging reflection and dialogue among the people involved.
The structure of the elements that accumulate in a system (stocks) and the elements that determine their accumulation (flows) play an important role in understanding the dynamics of the system, along with feedback loops. The various elements often influence each other by sharing this stock and flow or being part of a chain of them. At the intermediate level, we understand stocks and flows and find effective ways to work by wading through them with other elements and re-establishing appropriate boundaries between stocks and flows. Sources and sinks that create limits to growth can also be a type of stock.
While there are various schools of systems thinking, the systems dynamics school of systems thinking is most utilized in policy analysis, corporate strategy, and organizational development. By constructing a system dynamics model that quantitatively grasps the relationships among the aforementioned stock and flow, feedback loops, and other intertwined factors, it is possible to quantitatively grasp the mechanism of change that has occurred up to now, as well as to understand what results and impact various policies and measures will have. It is a tool for conducting simulations on a medium- to long-term time horizon.
Translated into Japanese, it means “leverage point” and refers to an intervention point where a small force can produce a large result. It can be called the pressure point of the problem structure. In practice. In policy and strategy discussions we often tend to argue and invest resources in points that have no leverage. However, it is difficult to tell from a quick glance where the leverage points are in a complex system without a considerable understanding of the mechanics of the system. While it is not a magic wand, an experienced systems thinker will identify each possible leverage point in a sequence, and then find the leverage points through repeated discussions with stakeholders and repeated observation and experimentation in the field in areas where there is strong potential.
“KPIs, KGIs, and OKRs (1)” and others. Hierarchical analysis of issues, Petri nets described in “System Modeling with Petri Nets using Clojure” can also be used as a dynamic modeling simulation of the system.
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