Perhaps it will not surprise you if I say you may experience this course as rather different to any you may have previously encountered. Like any course of study, you are likely to find surprising and interesting material in it but there are three specific ways this course may surprise and even challenge you.
These three ways are concerned with:
Each of these is discussed briefly in the next sections.
There are no simple definitions for either systems thinking or systems practice. It’s difficult to find definitions that capture all the perspectives that the ideas carry for people who think of themselves as systems thinkers and systems practitioners. Most systems practitioners seem to experience the same kind of difficulty in explaining what they do or what it means to be systemic in their thinking. Through experience I’ve developed some criteria by which I characterise systems thinking, but they seem to be quite loose in the sense that those characteristics are not always observable in what I recognise as systems thinking. In any case, they seem to be my list of characteristics, similar to, but not the same as, other people’s lists. This issue will be developed later but, for the moment, hold the idea that systems thinking and systems practice arise from particular ways of seeing the world.
Figure 4 An image of the dynamic relationship between systems thinking and systems practice.
Through interacting with the course and asking yourself questions about your experiences, you should discover at least some of these characteristic ways of seeing the world. If you have previously studied systems courses, you will already have experienced forms of systems thinking and perhaps ‘caught’ it in some way. You may even have developed your own understanding of systems thinking and what it means. If you have not studied systems thinking before, you need to be aware this course cannot make you into a systems thinker or a systems practitioner. It can only provide you with a framework through which you can develop your own characteristic ways of being a systems thinker and a systems practitioner.
Gather up your ideas of what these central ideas are in the following activity.
Allow approximately 10 minutes for this activity.
Make notes on what you think are the main features of systems thinking.
This is not a test question. There are no right or wrong answers. You are simply being invited to explore what you already understand about systems thinking. Try to make your answer as comprehensive as you can.
If you have already studied systems thinking, you may find this task quite demanding because you will have to abstract these general ideas from what may be quite detailed understandings. Don’t be afraid to spend slightly longer on this if you need to.
If your only experience of systems thinking is through any background reading you may have done, you may want to base your answers directly on your recent reading. That’s fine but try to ensure that, in doing this activity, you are building your understanding and not just abstracting a list from someone else’s ideas.
Your notes from this activity will form a powerful basis from which to build your understanding of, and capacity for, systems thinking. You will develop your own ways of working with the notes you take as you work through the course. I prefer not to throw away any note, even if it gets superseded. It provides me with a record of my developing understanding, especially if I note down what I now understand and why I now think the old understanding is unhelpful. Even notes I think are redundant can prove to be the anchors for new insights.
Figure 5 Breaking situations down doesn’t always work.
Systems thinking characteristically moves one’s focus in the opposite direction, working towards understanding the big picture – the context – as a way of making complexity understandable. Most people recognise they have been in situations where they ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’. Systems thinking is precisely about changing the focus of attention to the wood, so that you can see the trees in their context. Understanding the woodland gives new and powerful insights about the trees. Such insights are completely inaccessible if one concentrates on the individual trees. In other words, systems thinking provides a framework for reflecting on boundary judgements.
Systems thinking seems to come more naturally to some people than to others who have to learn to think systemically. People trying systems thinking for the first time find it quite tricky in the early stages. The temptation to break down the situation into smaller bits is strong. The systems approaches you will briefly encounter in Week 7 take account of this and are designed to enable you to capture the complexity before you move on to exploring it.
This is what this course is about. It is an invitation to engage with systems thinking in such a way that you are better able to address the situations, complexities and opportunities that you encounter as you engage with the nitty gritty of whatever you do. Systems thinking provides tools-for-thought and the opportunity for a powerful way of looking at the world, whatever the context. The contexts stretch all the way from international issues such as global warming to the day-to-day problems that arise in work, in domestic life and in the local community.
Systems practice in the context of this course refers to the practice of systems thinking within whatever profession or calling you follow. You can be a systemic medical practitioner, a systemic wood turner, a systemic technician or a systemic manager by applying systems thinking, insights and approaches to the complexity that you encounter in any of these or other domains.
Not much of this course conforms to the traditional pattern mentioned earlier – the theory-example-exercise pattern. In particular, you will find you are expected to discover much of it for yourself. Why is this? This is a legitimate question and deserves a full answer.
One year, a student at a residential summer school complained I had not taught him properly. I was, he told me, an expert and so why did I not demonstrate how to tackle the problem he was working on and pass my expertise on to him. He felt the tutorial was ‘a wasted opportunity’. I could understand why he felt aggrieved. But I think he had missed an important feature of learning a skill such as systems thinking.
More and more, I’ve come to realise that whatever expertise I may have in systems thinking and practice, it is my expertise and it only works for me. In this I find myself in agreement with C.W. Churchman (1971), who was one of the first people to write about what systems thinking might mean in practice, when he said ‘there are no experts in a systems approach’. When I look at the people whom I believe to be experts in this area, I realise there are many ways of being good at systems thinking and many ways of being good at systems practice. Each systems thinker seems to be good in their own way. I believe this is because systems thinking in practice is about ways of experiencing the world, ways of thinking, and about ways of dealing with the complex situations I encounter.
Consequently, systems expertise is unique to each person. I cannot tell you how it’s going to work for you or how you should understand it. You have to find your own ways. All I can do is to invite you into experiences that are likely to help you create your own meanings from the material. As well as being the only logically consistent way of learning systems thinking, there is plenty of research evidence to show that understandings and knowledge that one acquires through discovery is retained and developed much more readily than the understandings one acquires through being told, or even shown.
Taking responsibility for your own learning in this way is challenging but it need not be difficult. It requires a preparedness to experiment with ideas and styles of learning that may not initially feel right or comfortable.
Figure 6 Life is complex.
All this means learning systems thinking in practice is an intensely personal business. Don’t worry if you’re not used to reflective learning, you will be able to develop your capacities for learning this way, as you go. This is why it was important to think through what you want to achieve from the course. It can operate at a level beyond acquisition of skills and knowledge. Because it is about different styles of thinking, the process of thinking systemically can itself give rise to new forms of learning. It has the capability of bringing understanding into being from sources inside oneself. This is the process known as reflective learning.
For some people, systems thinking will be something they practice from time to time. It will be a set of tools-for-thought they use when the need arises. This is a powerful and important potential outcome from the course. The course can also lead you towards becoming systemic, as well as being about systems. You can use it to become a different sort of thinker.
Either way, I strongly urge you once again to do the activities. They are designed to enable you to discover your own learning by experience. They are much more important than the practice-makes-perfect quizzes which can only test ‘know what’ rather than ‘know how’ and ‘know why’. The activities will support you in making systems thinking and systems practice your own. Without them, systems thinking and systems practice remain ‘out there’ – something you may know about (description) but not know how to use (competence). This course has aspirations beyond that, which I hope you will come to share; to support you in becoming a systems thinker and a systems practitioner. This is why the activities so far appear to be focused on you. You might see them in terms of preparing the soil in which skills, competencies and confidence can grow.
Common sense tells me my experience and understanding of the world are limited. I am 185 cm in height. That limits my view of the world. It may not matter much that I cannot see what my house looks like from above but it does mean there will be things going on in the roof I may not notice until they impinge on areas that I can experience.
More significantly, there is a real limitation on understanding the experiences of other people. You might tell me about your experience but your description is likely to be only a partial representation and, however good your description, I cannot share your experience. I can only construct my own mental representation of what your experience might be like. But the limitations on my understanding of the world are even more fundamental than this.
My mental image of the world is a model. It is a partial representation of reality based on the partial knowledge I have of the external world. So, when I think I am thinking about the world I am thinking about my model of the world. This model of the world is built up in a way that is itself a model. So I am using a model, built by a model, to represent the world I think I see.
This has important implications. The model that represents the world tells me what I see and tells me what to see. The model both limits what I see and reinforces itself. When I think about the world, I am thinking about my own thinking; I have no direct access to the world at all.
Many people find this idea unsettling when they first meet it. It seems to defy common sense. It raises the question of how real the so-called real world really is.
Many people think of the brain as very similar to a computer. Both have a similarly large proportion of ‘processors’ operating on internally generated signals. But there is an important and absolutely fundamental difference. The computer does not create its own meanings. The computer, even if using artificial intelligence programmes, has no capacity for deciding, for example, which are its favourite paintings in the National Gallery. I do. I have a history of interacting with external stimuli that generate new ways of interacting with further stimuli and the internal structure of my brain changes as a result. The computer’s ways of dealing with data are not the result of its own self-production, but of its analysis of what has already been produced. The way the computer works remains the same, whether it is processing pictures from the National Gallery or large amounts of text to answer a query. The rules that relate input to output are constant over time.
The question of what I can know about the outside world is an ancient one and has always been central in philosophy under the theme of epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge and knowing: how do I know about the outside world? How do I know my senses are not fooling me? What constitutes evidence about the world?
Neither discussions about modelling, nor the insights of philosophy, can tell me how true my internal representations of the world are, but neurological studies seem to suggest the outside world is unknowable as it is. This course considers this important issue. Epistemology becomes a central concern. This contrasts sharply with many other courses where epistemology is never addressed. The world is assumed to be ‘out there’ and more-or-less as it appears.
Recognising the world is unknowable as it is presents me with a choice. How do I deal with the day-to-day observations and events that seem to emerge from it? Each person, once they become aware of this unknowability, is confronted with, and needs to make their own choice.
Each choice is individual but seems to cluster around three main poles:
Consciously making the choice between these poles, and all the variants between, is an act of epistemological awareness.
Figure 7 The dynamic between an explainer, an explanation and a listener (or reader).