Thinking in Systems

Systems are everywhere. The human body is a system. So is an organ in the human body such as the brain or the spleen. If you keep going “downward,” so are the molecules and atoms that make up the tissues that make up the organs in the human body, or the body of any other living thing.

A family is a system. So is a town or community. So is the government and the U.S. economy, however messy they may seem at times. Moving “upward,” we find the ecosphere sometimes called the eco-system, with its cycles from growing seasons to climate. The planet itself is a system. All the planets plus the sun, all their satellites, asteroids, comets, etc., comprise the solar system. And so on.

What do all these have in common? What is a system, in other words, and why is it useful to think in systems?

The simple and somewhat hackneyed answer is that a system is any arrangement of entities, its components, so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The more interesting sense of what systems are lies with the fact that the whole of a system generally has properties we can study that couldn’t have been predicted from a study of the parts by themselves. The arrangement or structure is the key to sometimes entirely new properties emerging.

What makes the study of systems important is the relationship systems have to each other in an environment they affect and which affects them. So far as we can tell, there aren’t any completely closed systems — probably not even the universe itself (“finite but unbounded,” some say, which may be helpful or not). Matter, energy, and information are always flowing across the boundaries of a system, as well as upward and downward from component subsystems or to still larger systems. These have to be in the right quantities and types, or systems become either overloaded or starved or maybe poisoned.

Pain, given thinking in systems, is not necessarily a bad thing — even if it hurts! The utilitarians got it wrong, in other words. Pain is information! It is some part of your body, perhaps some subsystem, communicating to your brain (and so to you) that something is wrong and that action is needed. This is as true, by the way, of psychological pain of various sorts as it is physical pain. Flows of information in larger systems, including economies, sometimes yield reactions capable of being interpreted as equivalents of pain.

The circumstances that can disrupt systems can be studied, as well as the kinds of processes that strengthen systems against sources of disruption. This can be an important part of public health, which is more than just the health of persons but that of families, communities, and societies. Some speak of the “three levels of prevention” which are three levels of health care itself. The first level is preventive: everything you do to avoid getting sick, or the kinds of policies that will prevent societal disruption on a large scale. The second level is curative: what can be done medically or policywise to restore a balance that has been lost due to temporary disruption. The third level is palliative: what (if anything) can be done to create a new balance following severe and permanent disruption (a person has had a stroke; a nation has just endured a major terrorist attack or possibly a natural disaster).

Human behaviors, both individually and in groups, form parts of systems we can break down into habits, whether good or bad, and here is where thinking in systems gets interesting from the perspective of what helps us be productive. Your morning routine could be thought of as a system, as it has components like any other system, and if it’s stable and not prone to being disrupted all the time, it has a better chance of being productive of value.

Behavioral systems, like all systems, flourish within environments that are either conducive to productive activities or not. They can be strengthened or they can be weakened. Likewise, you can become conscious of environmental factors that are enhancing your productivity, the good systems, and also those that are interfering with it, the bad ones, and start working to eliminate the bad ones.

This is not mere “will power,” one of the most overinvoked phrases there is. “Will power” — which I define as a single, out-of-context decision to do something or succeed at something (it could be writing an article every morning or quitting smoking are something more ambitious like earning a million dollars in the next year) — generally does not work. Why not? Because it doesn’t take into consideration the systemic factors that have to go into place as a condition for any success, even a small one.

A former health education professor of mine (with whom I later wrote a paper on the subject of systems thinking and health promotion) described a triadic relationship: antecedents, behaviors, and consequences (the ABC System, he called it).

Antecedents (the term derives from a Greek word meaning that which comes before) set the conditions for behaviors. They act as triggers, a popular term these days. If the behavior is undesirable, learn the antecedents behind it and start changing them.

If it’s a smoking habit one is trying to conquer, learn all the conditions that are in place that tempt you to smoke: is it drinking, eating certain foods, being in a certain place at a certain time of the day, being with certain other people, or simply seeing ashtrays giving off a cigarette smell sitting around. Change these antecedents, and you can set some conditions for changing the behavior — keeping in mind that these will be different for different people because of the differences in our surrounding systems. A “one size fits all” approach also does not work.

Note also the consequences of having arrested a bad behavior just one or a few times. To stick with the same example, note that if you can go just a few days without cigarettes, your breathing may be better. Food may taste better. Your hands and clothes and, above all, your breath, will probably smell better. Your friends might notice and comment on the change, surely a benefit and a reinforcer. If you’ve gotten rid of all those ashtrays, you’ve made smoking less convenient and gotten rid of what may be, for some people, an important trigger.

It might also be helpful to have gotten support, such as joining a smoking cessation group. That is to say, participate in a larger system. People can reinforce each other, just by comparing notes. If you’re trying to break a difficult habit, arranging support may be a crucial antecedent as well as a much stronger reinforcer for keeping new habits in place.

Thinking in systems can help develop good habits as well as eliminate bad or unwanted ones. One of the things I discovered quite some time ago is that I can turn out decent copy quickly early in the morning. But it doesn’t happen automatically. It happens if I make the right arrangements, usually the night before. When I realized this I began to arrange my schedule accordingly, with open space for writing during the period when I know I am strongest. The articles I’ve done recently for this LinkedIn profile have all been written that way, with just these small antecedents in place: quiet apartment (wife still in bed), pets fed and no longer bothering me, coffee as something of a stimulant, and open time which I scheduled the night before — this last akin to an appointment with my computer.

It’s a practice I now recommend: arranging antecedents (and by all means write them down!), and then noting consequences after the desired actions take place. Consequences, again, tell you that you are on the right track!

There’s much more to thinking in systems, of course. The phrase itself comes from a book I recommend, by Donella H. Meadows (Thinking in Systems: A Primer, published in 2008). She shows how systems thinking applies at all levels of what is sometimes called the hierarchy of systems from the personal to the familial to the social and economic to the ecological.

The important realization here is that our actions or behaviors are always being affected by what is going on around us, just as our actions or behaviors affect what happens subsequently. It thus helps to be aware of such, as much as possible. This is true of companies and business corporations both small and large as well. It is true of governments, or just of agencies in governments, at whatever level. If there’s a pain point in any of these, the worst thing the major players can do is pretend it isn’t there and hope it goes away on its own! It won’t!

This is as true of an economic system as a whole, which affects its parts through that downward flow of matter, energy and information to its components, and can lead to prosperity or poverty, depending sometimes on just what is happening structurally (jobs being outsourced or replaced by technology, for example, with no alternatives or compensation).

To invoke one last and perhaps controversial example, some people don’t believe human activity — such as burning fossil fuels — is causing the climate to change. Now maybe it’s true that some of what’s said about man-made climate change is exaggerated. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The climate, though, is a complex system, one of the many elements that make up Planet Earth. What have we learned here? That systems are a very fundamental component of reality, the world we inhabit, and that they both affect and are affected by what goes on outside them at multiple levels.  

What we’ve seen, in this case, suggests the unlikelihood that human industrial activity could take place on the scale we’ve seen for the past century and a half or so without there being some effect on the atmosphere, however difficult it might be to get clear on just what that effect is. To my mind the proper stance is precautionary, and to encourage developing systemic economic behaviors that “ride on” systems operating in the environment instead of continuing with disruptive ones. This, though, is a much longer story than we can get into here.

Whether it’s learning to think well about one’s own productivity and the conditions for it, or in figuring out complicated and often-uncomfortable truths about larger issues involving the economy, public health, or the effects of our activities on the planet, I recommend learning to think in terms of systems: what they are, how they interact with other systems in an environment … and what can either enhance or sabotage their best workings.