[The first requirement of a system is that] a system is a whole that consists of parts, each of which can affect its behaviour or its properties. You for example are a biological system called an organism and you consist of parts – your heart, your lungs, stomach, pancreas and so on – each of which can affect your behaviour or your properties.
The second requirement is that each part of the system, when it affects the system, is dependent for its effect on some other part. In other words, the parts are interdependent. No part of the system, or collection of parts of the system, has an independent effect on it. Therefore the way the heart affects you depends on what the lungs are doing and the brain is doing – the parts are all interdependent.
Therefore, a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts.
Now that has some very important implications that are generally overlooked. First, the essential or defining properties of any system are properties of the whole which none of its parts have. For example, a very elementary system which you are familiar with is an automobile. The essential property of an automobile is that it can carry you from one place to another. No part of an automobile can do that. The wheel can’t, the axle can’t, the seat can’t, the motor can’t. The motor can’t even carry itself from one place to another. But the automobile can.
You have certain characteristics, the most important of which is life. None of your parts live. You have life. You can write. Your hand can’t write. That’s easy to demonstrate, cut it off and put it on the table and watch what it does. Nothing. You can see your eye can’t see, you can think your brain can’t think…
… when a system is taken apart it loses its essential properties. If I bring an automobile into this room and disassemble it, although every single part is in this room I don’t have an automobile, because the system’s not the sum of the behaviour of its parts, it’s the product of their interactions.
Now what does that mean?
If we have a system of improvement that’s directed at improving the parts taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved. And that can be rigorously proven, but most applications of improvement programs are directed at improving the parts taken separately.
[This is the] basic principle: an improvement program must be directed at what you want, not what you don’t want… it should be perfectly obvious, when you get rid of what you don’t want you don’t necessarily get what you do want. And so finding deficiencies and getting rid of them is not a way of improving the performance of a system. And determining what you want requires that you redesign the system, not for the future but for right now, and asking yourself what would you do right now if you could do whatever you wanted to?
Because if you don’t know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how in the world can you know what you can do under constraints?
…
Continuous improvement isn’t nearly as important as discontinuous improvement. Creativity is a discontinuity. A creative act breaks with the chain that has come with before it…
Russell Ackoff – Systems Thinking Lecture
See also:
Systems: complicated and complex – Aaron Dignan
Towards solving difficult problems in complex systems
Donella Meadows on systems thinking: elements, interconnections, purposes
Systems thinking: Peter Senge on the limits of learning from experience
The Wizards (2): Harold Abelson on controlling complexity and real vs idealised systems
Systems thinking: Gall’s Law
Building systems, questioning statistics, finding things out, decline and fall
Rob Ricigliano on the murky unpredictability of complex systems
Resource: Seth Godin on Systems Thinking