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The
concept of ‘system’ is overly used in our
society. Today everything is labeled as ‘system’
from corporations to a computer chip. But the
fact is that in systemic thinking, the concept
‘system’ is not used to refer things in the
world but a particular way of organizing our
thoughts about reality. The history and
development of systemic thinking is outlined in
number of references (Bertalanffy, Bateson,
Churchman, Ackoff, Forrester, Checkland,
Senge).
The notion of system is inextricably bound up
with an individual’s world-view. Any kind of
thinking is based on certain assumptions, e.g.
physicist Joe Rosen wrote in The Capricious
Cosmos: “Science is our attempt to understand
the reproducible and predictable aspects of
nature.” Reproducibility and predictability
becomes the basic assumptions for scientific
thinking, you start from a hypothesis and your
hypothesis has a plausibility depending upon
certain assumptions. Experiments are used as
device to verify the reproducible and
predictable aspects of the hypothesis. Another
example, mechanistic thinking, adheres analysis
and reductionism, claiming that all objects and
events, and their properties, can be understood
in terms of ultimate elements.
The nature can reflect infinite number of
viewpoints or systems of thoughts. If you
believe that the most important thing in the
universe is polarity, you can see it everywhere,
space-time, north and south poles, mind and
body, roots and shoots in plants. If one thinks
that most important thing is trinity then one
can find trinities everywhere, three dimensions,
Trinity in Bible (Father, Son and Holy Ghost),
pyramids and so on. If you think it is four,
then you find squares, four points of compass,
four views of UML and so on. Trying to know
‘something’ following a system of thought will
simply create a result, i.e., ‘something’,
produced by that system of thought – not knowing
something.
Systemic thinking believes that our thinking is
not separate from universe i.e., observer,
observation and observed are interdependent and
interconnected, which also means that there is
no such thing as independent observation rather
interactions and interventions. The viewpoints
or systemic methods are like maps of a
territory; all maps are limited descriptions of
territory but some are useful. The goal of
systems thinking (systemic method) is to develop
maps (viewpoints or models) which are useful for
a certain purpose and context.
Painting by
M C Escher
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