George Edw. Seymour
“Systems theory is an interdisciplinary field of science. It studies the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science. More specifically, it is a framework by which one can analyze and/or describe any group of objects that work in concert to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or society, or any electro-mechanical or informational artifact….Systems theory as an area of study specifically developed following the World Wars from the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Anatol Rapoport, Kenneth E. Boulding,…C. West
Churchman and others in the 1950s.”
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The modern contributions to systems theory can be traced to 1931 when Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a biologist at the
University of Chicago (see photo on the right), presented his General Systems Theory. Bertalanffy argued cogently for “open systems” as opposed to the more traditional closed systems associated with classical science. Another important early contributor was Norbert Wiener who published Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. Both the concepts of control and feedback are central to psychology.
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Why learn about or study systems? For the study and practice of psychology, isn’t it sufficient to understand and incorporate proper methods of research and statistical design? The brief answer is no. To quote Katz and Kahn (1978, pp.18/21), “The first problem in understanding an organization or a social system is its location and identification. How do we know that we are dealing with an organization? What are the boundaries? What behavior belongs to the organization and what behavior lies outside it? Who are the individuals whose actions are to be studied and what segments of their behavior are to be included?....The problem of identifying the boundaries of an organization is solved by following the energic and informational transaction as they relate to the cycle of activities of input, throughput, and output.” Fundamentally, open systems receive from, change or process what they receive, and then contribute back to their environment.
Input Process Output
As can be seen in the figure above, the fundamental components of systems theory are the (a) identification of the system, (b) inputs, process (often called throughput), and output definitions, and a feedback loop. In open systems, especially in the social sciences, any system will exchange capital, energy, information, material, and people, with its environment. But feedback from the output or environment is the key to successful systems.
Science is celebrated for accumulating and thinking in terms of pieces of the puzzle. Peter Senge
(2006) has stated “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the
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world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. When we then try to “see the big picture,” we try to reassemble the fragments in our minds, to list and organize all the pieces. But, as physicist
David Bohm says, the task is futile–similar to trying to reassemble the fragments of a broken mirror to see a true reflection. Thus, after a while we give up trying to see the whole altogether.”
Thus, scientists typically study only a small part of any topic with the recognition that to study larger parts generally contributes to ambiguous findings. To understand if and how systems theory is used in psychology today, a search was made in the American Psychological
Association database for all journal publications using the term, “systems theory” in the title from 1940 to 2007. Ten results were found, the first of which were published in 1952. Half were associated with family, counseling and psychoanalysis, whereas the earlier ones, identified in the
Resource section, consisted of more generic systems theory discussion. By broadening the search to include the term “systems theory” in the abstract, 89 findings were found, the most recent of which were defined by clinical, counseling, developmental, and family systems.
Consequently it would be reasonable to conclude that systems’ thinking is honored more in breach than in practice for much current psychology published research including social psychology.
From the beginning, three brilliant thinkers have contributed substantially to Systems Theory, C.
West Churchman, Russell L. Ackoff, and Herbert A. Simon. All of these men thought large.
They were systems thinkers in the true sense of that term. Churchman
3 “was an American philosopher in the field of management science, operations research and systems theory. He is internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research and system analysis.” In
1968 he summed up the vision of systems theory nicely, ““How can we design improvement in large systems without understanding the whole system, and if we the answer is that we cannot, how is it possible to understand the whole system?” Therein lays the key to understanding and using systems theory. We never can understand the whole system, but we must acknowledge that, and then seek to address well defined and substantial problems.
Ackoff “received his doctorate in philosophy of science in 1947 as C. West Churchman’s first doctoral student. Next he went on to receive his doctorate of science from the University of
Lancaster in 1967.”
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His 1972 book discussed purposeful systems, or how systems thinking addresses human behavior. Like his mentor, he understood that systems, or complex human organizations by implication, can be understood only with consideration for their cultural, psychological, and social components. Most recently, he and his coworkers created the term, and published a book called, “f-Laws” which contains more than “100 distilled observations of bad leadership and the misplaced wisdom that often surrounds management in organizations.”
Simon “was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science.” Simon is perhaps best known for his Postulate of Bounded Rationality and the concept and research addressing the human decision process of “Satisficing.”
It should be recognized that systems concepts and theory are considered so valuable that many disciplines have taken them for their own use. For example, George Klir
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is considered by many, but seldom by psychologists, as the “father of systems science.” Systems science, according to Klir, is the study of knowledge structures and serves as a bridge between natural
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language and mathematics. Likewise, David Mindell has provided a useful historical systems perspective from the engineering viewpoint (cf. Appendix A).
Although he did not use the term “systems theory,” Kurt Lewin (photo left) did originate the concept of human behavior as a function of both the person and the environment [B=ƒ( P,E )], an early systems perspective, and he is generally given credit as the founder of the discipline to study groups scientifically (e.g., Lewin, 1947).
Nevertheless, within psychology, George Miller has created the most ambitious conception and model of systems. Using concepts from
Bertalanffy, he identified the scope of General Systems Theory in 1956 as follows:
“General systems theory is a series of related definitions, assumptions, and postulates about all levels of systems from atomic particles through atoms, molecules, crystals, viruses, cells, organs, individuals, small groups, societies, planets, solar systems, and galaxies. General behavior systems theory is a subcategory of such theory, dealing with living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. A significant fact about living things is that they are open systems, with important inputs and outputs. Laws which apply to them differ from those applying to relatively closed systems”
Moreover, in 1978 Miller provided a list of 173 testable cross-level hypotheses (Miller and
Miller, 1992). We can see how Miller’s focus differs somewhat from those of Churchman and
Ackoff. Nevertheless, all of these systems theorists reached far beyond the traditional stimulus response or traditional academic research design populating our scientific journals. Again, as noted above, systems theory is relatively rarely used within academic psychology, and then mostly within family systems and clinical applications.
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Yet, the value for studying and understanding systems in psychology was covered in detail by
Katz and Kahn 7 who broke new ground for studying organizations using the systems approach. 8
Uniquely they emphasized the common characteristics of open systems, such as negative entropy, feedback, homeostasis, differentiation, coordination, and equifinality.
Today, the process of the systems approach is being used mainly by organizational consultants because their “real world” challenges, derived from organizations that recognize the need for support, demands value and process improvement. Systems’ thinking provides a common frame for exploring, measuring, and understanding complex and fluid organizations. Moreover, it brings the organization leadership into the analysis because the consultant will explore diverse internal and external factors, seldom considered by leaders. Anyone seeking to improve an organization, be it a basketball team or a car manufacturer, should bring the perspective and tools associated with systems theory.
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Appendix A:
Three Regimes of Systems: Historical Perspectives on Systems Thinking in
Engineering 9
David A. Mindell
This paper surveys the history of systems thinking in engineering in the United States, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The history can be divided into three phases.
In each phase, engineers concentrated on certain kinds of technical systems, and developed types of systems thinking to deal with them. First, from the late nineteenth century to World War II, systems thinking concentrated in the electric power and telephone industries and focused on interconnecting disparate elements into larger wholes, frequently for systems spread over large geographic areas. Second, the imperatives of World War II led engineers to conceptualize systems as integrated, dynamic entities, and to formalize methodologies for managing the complex organizations to design and operate such systems. This phase flourished in the Cold
War, although its techniques are still with us today in selected areas. The third phase, what we call Engineering Systems, began to emerge in the 1990s when engineers began to expand the boundaries of technical systems to include not only their internal or organizational dynamics, but also broader social and industrial contexts. They also recognize that the complexity of these systems means that accurate prediction or even simulation is not always possible.
At the turn of the 20 th
Century, two new systems dominated the technological landscape: electric power and the telephone network. Thomas Edison designed not only light bulbs, but a system that also included generators and transmission lines to compete with gas lighting. By the
1920s, engineers conceptualized electric power systems as sets of interconnected elements like generators, motors, traction loads, or transmission lines each of which could be designed and analyzed independently. In the 1920s, as local or regional power networks connected into national “grids” or “superpower” systems, the new entities began to exhibit new behaviors that could only be understood by looking at the system as a whole. Still, within this engineering culture engineers tended not to use self-conscious language of “systems” to describe their work, although managers did increasingly see the system as including both physical power networks and the organizations that supported them.
In the telephone network, by contrast, the language of systems was more explicit. AT&T chief
Theodore Vail’s famous motto “One policy, one system, universal service,” captured the company’s totalizing view, though its network was composed of vast numbers of small, interconnected units. Within AT&T, engineers referred to their national network as “the
System,” and beginning in the 1920s the company had job titles for “System Engineers” and
“Systems Development” departments. Yet these engineers did not have the most abstract view of the system, but rather concentrated on its concrete manifestations: the equipment layouts, power systems, and wiring diagrams for local substations. When Bell Telephone Laboratories was founded in 1925, engineers did begin to study the abstractions of the system like the statistics of switching, and the interchangeability of bandwidth, but systems were still understood as hierarchical assemblies of component parts, with unidirectional, linear interactions.
The second phase of systems thinking began to emerge During World War II. In response to technical problems like radar and automatic gunfire control, engineers now conceptualized their systems as dynamic, integrated entities with feedbacks, where the behavior of each part helped
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determine the behavior of the whole. New techniques arose from the merger of servomechanism theory, communications theory, and feedback control. The term “system engineering” emerged to capture the sense that the products of advanced engineering, particularly in the military realm, could no longer be considered as individual machines or things but as systems: an aircraft was no longer simply a machine, but a collection of systems, for engines, fuel flow, structure, controls, etc.
Technical and organizational currents in the second phase of systems coalesced during the Cold
War. For the Atlas project to build the first ICBM, the prime contractor was no longer an airframe manufacturer but rather a system engineering corporation, in this case Thompson-Ramo
Woolridge (TRW). A similar set of systems oriented companies appeared, frequently in new organizational forms like RAND and MITRE. During the 1950s, a host of new disciplines appeared that we might call the systems sciences, including cybernetics, operations research, general systems theory, systems analysis, and systems dynamics – each had its own techniques, its own home institutions and its dominant professions. All viewed the world in terms of flows, feedbacks, and interactions, and analyzed systems by breaking them down into component parts, understanding the characteristics of those parts, and then recombining them. These approaches were considered “engineering science,” wherein expert analysis brought objective, quantitative analysis to complex problems, from nuclear targeting to the economics of innovation. They were characterized by the belief that experts, computers, and numbers could overcome politics and personal influence, which were considered irrational.
The Cold War systems sciences achieved great success, particularly in areas with clearly defined technical goals, like the Apollo project -- explicitly modeled on the Atlas program and hailed as a triumph of systems engineering. The systems sciences also overreached, however, and met their limits in Vietnam, the Great Society programs, and other civil systems with complex interactions, heavy political components, and and vaguely defined boundaries.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the third phase of systems thinking, which now goes under the rubric “engineering systems,” subtly began to emerge. Engineers recognized that technological systems exhibit complex behaviors that are rational, but not entirely predicable. As
Thomas Hughes argues, late-century engineering projects like the Central Artery and Tunnel in
Boston began to treat the “messy complexity” of politics, social movements, and local interests not as external influences to be factored out, but as internal variables. The internet made it clear that distributed, unplanned systems could grow to be incredibly complex and powerful.
Engineers increasingly turned their attention to large (sometimes global-scale) systems that exhibit complex behavior. At the same time, computer and simulation technologies advanced to the point where systems as complex as the global climate could be modeled with some degree of confidence, and used as a basis for making policy. Joe Sussman describes this era with the term
CLIOS (Complex, Large, Interconnected, Open Systems) that explicitly include social, political, and economic variables in their models and definitions, and other new formulations are emerging as well.
These three phases do not constitute a linear progression; rather today’s systems landscape has elements from each phase, and each generation incorporates and furthers the ideas of the former. Still, the historical schema of three phases clarifies the issues at stake in defining
Engineering Systems today and places it in historical perspective.
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Resources:
Ackoff, R., Addison, H. J. & Bibb, S. (2006). Management f-Laws: How Organizations Really
Work . Triarchy Press.
Hare, P. (2000). Book review: Social Interaction Systems: Theory and Measurement: by Bales,
Robert Freed. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice . 4 (2) 199-208.
Hickey, T. J. (2005). History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science. http://www.philsci.com/
Huitt, W. G. Systems Theory, Chaos Theory, Nonlinearity, etc.: http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/artsci.html
Katz, D. & Kahn, R. L. (1978). The Social Psychology of Organizations . New York: Wiley.
Kessen, W. & Kimble, G. A. (1952). "Dynamic systems" and theory construction. Psychological
Review . 59 (4) 263-267.
Krech, D. (1952). A note on "Dynamic systems' and theory construction." Psychological Review .
59 (4) 268.
Lewin, K. (1947) Frontiers in group dynamics 1. Human Relations 1, 5-41.
Miller, J. G. (1956). General behavior systems theory and summary. Journal of Counseling
Psychology . 3 (2) 120-124. http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=main.showContent&id=1957-
04923-001&view=fulltext&format=pdf This is an excellent comparison and contrast between behavioral, learning, and non-directive therapy with the systems approach.
Miller, J.G. & Miller, J.L. (1992). Applications of Living Systems Theory. Adapted from
Analysis of Dynamic Psychological Systems, Volume 2: Methods and Applications, edited by
Ralph L. Levine and Hiram E. Fitzgerald. Plenum Press, New York. http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/asem05jm.html
Senge, P. (2006). The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/currency/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385517256&view=excerpt
Self-Organizing Systems (SOS) FAQ. (2006):: http://www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm
Taplin, J. R. (1980). Implications of general systems theory for assessment and intervention.
Professional Psychology . 11 (5) 722-727.
Wiener, Norbert. “Harvard awarded Wiener a Ph.D. in 1912, when he was a mere 18, for a dissertation on mathematical logic.”
Endnotes:
1 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_theory
2 “There are two common classes of control systems, with many variations and combinations: logic or sequential controls, and feedback or linear controls.” Examples of a logic control include “elevators, washing machines and other systems with interrelated stop-go operations.” An example of feedback includes the thermostat in your residence of this school. It is set for a desired temperature, and the system turns itself off and on to correct for
“error” in room temperature. That is called negative feedback and is considered essential for all systems. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_system
3 “Churchman has been cited by Noam Chomsky as the only professor from whom he learned anything as an undergraduate.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._West_Churchman
and http://projects.isss.org/C_West_Churchman
4 Russell L. Ackoff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff
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5 George Klir was a computer scientist who advanced systems thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Klir
6 “The first large-scale application of living systems theory was a 3-year study of 41 U.S. Army battalions (Ruscoe et al., 1985). The Army's own assessments had revealed problems that affected its capacity to achieve and maintain optimal levels of training efficiency and the ability of units to accomplish their assigned missions. There was no consensus about the methods of evaluating battalion effectiveness that the Army has used for many years.
These consist of many independent objective and subjective measures that do not relate to any integrated conceptual system. Although these may distinguish good and less good battalions, they do not reveal the basis for differentiating them (Miller and Miller, 1992).
7 Katz and Kahn (1978, p 33) state, “Organizations as a special class of open systems have properties of their own, but they share other properties in common with all open systems. These include the importation of energy from the environment, the throughput or transformation of the imported energy into some product form that is characteristic of the system, the exporting of that product into the environment, and the reenergizing of the system from the sources in the environment.”
8 It is informative to note that the 1980 volume titled, The Study of Organizations , edited by Katz, Kahn, and Adams contained neither “systems” nor “systems theory” in the subject index. However, the Introduction provided three pages about “Open Systems,” and Daniel Robey provided three paragraphs under the heading of Modern
Organization Theory: Systems and Environments.
9 MIT Engineering Systems Division Working Paper ESD-WP-2002-05 dated March 25, 2002.
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