Systems Thinkers

This is a book about the people who shaped an idea — that to make sense of the complexity of the world, we need to look at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting it down into its parts and looking at each in isolation. In this book we call that idea systems thinking, although others have called it by other names (such as systems theory or systems sciences). Within this idea we include a number of areas which have independent origins but have tended over time to become interlinked while retaining their distinctiveness — general systems theory, cybernetics, complexity theory and system dynamics among others. Our focus in the book is on people and how their personalities, lives and links with each other shaped these ideas. Other books have been written on the ideas as such, describing and classifying them in various ways, presenting a history of the ideas or arguing for the importance of one perspective or another. By focusing on the creators of the ideas, and by taking a broad look at a range of areas, we aim to shed a different light on systems thinking.

Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and philosopher, was a deeply original thinker who crossed multiple disciplines, always sitting on the edge between them. He began only late in life to attempt to synthesise his many contributions. As Brockman (2004) wrote, “Bateson is not easy … To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, was a rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society.” But his contributions were considerable, to a wide range of fields. He was perhaps the most wide-ranging and profound thinker in early cybernetics, and his work provides a foundation for much of the important work that followed, and a deep insight into the problems of the world today. Practically every discussion of Bateson's work contains a different list of his disciplinary interests. He worked at one time or another in zoology, anthropology, cybernetics, communications theory, psychiatry, ethology (animal behaviour) and philosophy; and he also had a strong impact on family therapy, the environmental movement and organisational theory. His contribution to each of these fields was profound, but he was always ready to move on—as his biographer put it, he “posted himself to the margins of not one, but multiple disciplines from which he secluded and then absented himself” (Lipset 2005, p. 911).

Norbert Wiener was a unique personality, a larger-than-life character famous for his very wide interests, extremely incisive mind and personal warmth, but also for his absent-mindedness, low self-esteem, and severe mood-swings. He was born in midwestern USA (Missouri) in 1894 to a Jewish family – his father had emigrated from Russia and his mother from Germany. Although the family were descended from the great twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonedes, their Jewishness was hidden from Wiener during his childhood, due to the anti-semitism of the times, and he practised no religion until late in life.

Warren McCulloch resembled an Old Testament prophet – he had a long beard, bright and intense eyes, great personal warmth but also great passion. Indeed Gregory Bateson (1991, p. 225) describes him as “like Moses, a leader who could and did bring us to the edge of the promised land, where he himself could never enter”. His prophetic status can also be seen in a remark he frequently made, “Don't bite my finger, look where I am pointing” (quoted by Seymour Papert, introduction to McCulloch 1965, p. xxviii).

Margaret Mead was one of the most well-known and well-respected social scientists of the twentieth century. She worked as an anthropologist, carrying out fieldwork over a number of years on a number of south Pacific islands. Her fame arose from the clarity of her writing, from her ability to express anthropological ideas in a way that the public could appreciate, and from the way she analysed her own culture (the United States) based on fieldwork elsewhere. She is not widely known as a systems thinker – yet she was deeply involved in the birth of the systems movement, and her work shows clear systemic elements.

Ross Ashby was a deeply original thinker, who produced innovative work in a number of different areas. He was a psychiatrist by training, and his core concern was in understanding how the mind and brain worked, to find “what principles must be followed when one attempts to restore normal function to a sick organism that is, as a human patient, of fearful complexity” (Ashby 1956, p. vii). The pursuit of this goal led him to advance the field of cybernetics very significantly. His influence on the field, both in his own time and to the present day, has been considerable.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy was the creator of general systems theory (GST) – he coined the term, developed it in detail in his many writings, and was a key part of the group which took it forward and spread the concept. Indeed, the systems movement would not have taken the form it did without Bertalanffy – for while holistic thinking has arisen in many places, it was Bertalanffy's language and concepts that took hold as the core of systems thinking. He was ahead of his time, always far beyond conventional views, and for the second half of his life never quite found a place where he fitted in. A fellow-founder of GST describes him as “kindly, shy, [with] a curious mixture of confidence that he was saying something important and diffidence that grew out of the lack of people to receive it” (Boulding 1983, p. 19). His biographer describes him as “the least known intellectual titan of the twentieth century” (Davidson 1983, p. 9).

Kenneth Boulding was an economist and one of the founders of general systems theory. He led a long and varied life, being involved in the founding of peace studies as well as general systems, writing volumes of poetry as well as many academic books, and making a significant contribution to ecology and social theory as well as his original field of economics. He was a broad-minded and diverse thinker who did much both to embody a systems approach across his many disciplines, and to influence systems thinking through his work. Elise Boulding (1995, p. 259), his wife, wrote that: Kenneth delighted in life. Nothing was too small to escape his absorbed attention. He always carried a tiny but powerful magnifying glass in his pocket so he could absorb details invisible to the naked eye of any object. By the same token, nothing was too large or too far away to escape his interest. At night he would mount his trusty telescope on the porch and lose himself in the stars. … Ironically, his way of seeing things was so unique that what people remember best about Kenneth was the unexpectedness of his observations, the unusual connections his mind was always making. Kenneth's mind at work was a mind at play.

Sir Geoffrey Vickers was a lawyer and manager, and provides an outstanding example of deep reflection after a long and varied career. He produced a series of important and thought-provoking works in retirement, which had a strong influence upon the developing use of systems thinking in management, decision-making and politics. He had such an impact upon the work of the Systems group at the Open University that its seminar room for many years had a large photograph of Vickers gazing down upon all discussions. Indeed, Open University students are still introduced to systems thinking with Vickers' analogy between the lobster trap which creatures enter but cannot leave and thinking traps into which people fall: “a trap is a trap only for the creatures which cannot solve the problems it sets. Man traps are dangerous only in relation to the limitations of what men can see and value and do” (Vickers 1972, p. 15).

This is a tale of two brothers, Howard and Eugene Odum, and how they introduced ideas from general systems theory and cybernetics into the field of ecology, in the process coming to dominate ecology as an academic discipline for decades. While both drew on systems ideas, our focus is on the younger brother, Howard, as it was he who more explicitly brought these ideas into ecology and was more closely aligned with systems organisations. The importance of the Odum brothers' contribution has been summed up by a former student of Howard's, who wrote that they “were not only among the first to educate generations of scholars and the public about ecology but also pioneers in uniting the human and social aspects of environmental issues with their ecological and natural dimensions” (Gunderson et al. 2002).

Jay Wright Forrester is an American engineer and management thinker. He is the founder of System Dynamics, an approach based on computer modelling which arguably has done more than any other method to provide a practical and realistic analysis of change processes in systems. System Dynamics (SD) has been taken up across the world, initially by Forrester's students and colleagues, but increasingly by a much wider community. It has had profound and influential applications in a range of fields, most prominently organisational management, urban planning and environmental policy. Forrester summed up his concerns and his understanding of SD in an ‘elevator pitch’ (a statement short enough to be spoken in an elevator ride) on an email list: System dynamics deals with how things change through time, which includes most of what most people find important. It uses computer simulation to take the knowledge we already have about details in the world around us and to show why our social and physical systems behave the way they do. System dynamics demonstrates how most of our own decision-making policies are the cause of the problems that we usually blame on others, and how to identify policies we can follow to improve our situation. (Forrester 1997).

Donella Meadows – known as Dana to her many friends – was an environmental scientist and activist. She was a prolific writer, best known for a single book, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) which sold millions of copies, but she was also the author of several other books and a widely-read weekly newspaper column. As an activist, she lived the life she advocated, working as an organic farmer and living in a sustainable community. As a colleague said of her, “she talked sustainable development, and walked it” (Hafkamp 2001).

Peter Michael Senge is a management academic and consultant. He has been principally responsible for drawing together and popularising the concept of the learning organisation. Through his work he has brought systems thinking (or at least a particular form of it) to the attention of a very wide audience. His ideas have primarily been applied in business organisations, but they have taken an increasingly wider dimension in recent years. He has described himself as an ‘idealistic pragmatist’, and his goal is idealistic: “to change the world by helping people change deeply” (Dumaine 1994).

Charles West Churchman was a philosopher of systems and management, who did more than anyone to bring ethical considerations into the field of systems thinking. He was a pioneer in several academic fields, always driven by what he described as his “moral outrage” (Churchman 1982, p. 17) that the human intellect is capable of organising society to solve the great problems of the world, such as malnutrition, poverty and war, and yet humanity allows these problems to persist. This moral outrage drove him to establish new fields, develop a range of influential theoretical concepts, and to work as a consultant to a number of important organisations. He was also a highly gifted teacher and developed in his students an acute critical and ethical awareness in his approach to systems thinking. A former student summed up his philosophy and personality, as well as his lasting contribution as follows: West Churchman has devoted his life and his philosophy to securing improvements in the human condition by means of the human intellect. His is a calling that demands from us the most in compassion and consciousness. He pursues it with dignity fortified with contagious passion. (Mason 1988, p. 374).

Russell Ackoff (usually known as ‘Russ’) is a pioneer of the application of systems approaches to management, both through theoretical developments and through a deep and practical engagement with many different organisations. He is a passionate advocate of the need for systems approaches to take full account of the complexity of inter-related problems and not simply to present glib technical solutions.

Peter Bernard Checkland has had a huge influence on systems thinking, especially in the fields of management and information systems, although his ideas have been taken up in a wide range of fields. He is most notable for the development of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), deriving from an action research programme lasting more than 30 years. As well as methodological innovations, Checkland introduced a number of key conceptual developments, in particular his distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems thinking, and his championing of the soft approach. As Mingers (2000, p. 747) notes, “SSM has reoriented an entire discipline and touched the lives of literally thousands of people … [soft] thinking is now completely taken for granted within the systems discipline”.

Werner Ulrich has carried out pioneering work on a critical approach to systems thinking for over 25 years. Most importantly, he has developed a highly important and useful method for applying this approach, Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH). He has carried out his work in both academia and in government, and applied his ideas to issues as diverse as public planning, evaluation, reflective practice, the concept of citizenship and civil society, and environmental discourse. While acknowledging a “personal bias towards a more philosophically based, critical kind of systems thinking” (Ulrich 2005a, p. 8), his work is deeply practical. His goal may perhaps be summed up by the title of one of his articles: “systems thinking as if people mattered” (Ulrich 1998).

Michael Jackson is a British management academic. He has made considerable advances in systems thinking and practice, especially in management and organisations, through his development of the Critical Systems Thinking (CST) approach. This approach emphasises the importance of politics and power in organisations. Jackson has been the main champion of CST since its inception, gave it its name, was one of the first to call for such an approach, and has been at the core of the main group developing the approach at the University of Hull. His goal for CST is ambitious but clearly stated: “to reconstitute systems thinking as a unified approach to problem management so that it can again stand at the leading edge in the development of the management sciences” (Jackson 2001, p. 236).

Heinz von Foerster was a physicist and philosopher, who worked extensively in cybernetics, biology and family therapy, although he hated being categorised as belonging to a particular academic discipline. Indeed he once remarked that “I am Viennese. That is the only label that I have to accept. I come from Vienna; I was born there, that's an established fact” (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, p. 43).

Stafford Beer was a consultant, manager and cybernetician. He was the first person to apply cybernetics to management problems. He combined theory and practice in a highly integrated way, always working as a practitioner but making a number of important contributions in both methodology and theory. His writing was highly inspirational as well as academically rigorous, and he had a profound impact upon those with whom he worked as a consultant and colleague. As Rosenhead (2006, p. 581) has written, “he explored in his work the implications of a holistic approach to organizational and social problems, and exemplified this approach in his own life”.

What is the nature of life? How do our cognitive processes relate to our perception of the world? These are big questions of both biology and philosophy, and answering them is the life-work of Humberto Romesín Maturana. His work has been massively influential in systems thinking, and has been applied to many other fields. It is deeply philosophical in its implications, but has a strong biological grounding. Although Maturana's name is most closely associated with the theory of autopoiesis (self-producing systems), work that he carried out with his student and close collaborator Francisco Varela, his work is more general than the ideas of autopoiesis. It can best be summed up in the title of an early paper (reprinted in Maturana and Varela, 1980) – the biology of cognition.

Niklas Luhmann was a theoretical sociologist, who built a unified theory of society based on systems theory. He particularly drew upon the tools of second-order cybernetics, notably the theory of autopoiesis. He was extremely prolific, publishing over 50 books and several hundred articles. His research programme, as stated when he took up his professorship in 1968, was “the theory of modern society. Duration 30 years; no costs” (Arnoldi 2001, p. 1). As he died in 1998, having published a theory of modern society the previous year, he achieved this programme precisely.

Paul Watzlawick made significant advances in applying a systems approach in a number of related fields: family therapy, communications theory, and change management. His ideas were firmly rooted both in theory and in practical experience, especially as a psychotherapist. His many writings included several books which are highly engaging and easily read. A colleague summed up his work and personality as follows (Ray 2007, p. 416): Through his writings and countless teaching seminars, this gentle man brought a clear and unequivocal message about the relational and contextual nature of human behaviour. Articulate and charming with old-school bearing, this brilliant yet unassuming man was the ideal ambassador to the world for the interactional view pioneered by the Palo Alto Group.

Ilya Prigogine was a chemist and physicist. He made enormous advances in the field of thermodynamics, historically the study of the behaviour of energy, heat and work in physical systems. His theory of dissipative structures, which describes the self-organising activity of systems ‘far from equilibrium’, has been foundational in complexity theory. He both drew upon systems theory and advanced it in important ways, particularly regarding systems in the physical world. His ideas have also been applied to human systems in several disciplines. McMillan (2004, p. 27) describes his work as follows: “Instead of a world where systems ran down and were subject to an ongoing deterioration, he showed that systems were essentially non-linear, dynamic and able to transform themselves into new states of being.”

Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and one of the founders of complexity theory. Through a series of highly detailed computer models, he has explored the nature of evolution and self-organisation – the ways in which order and organisation can spontaneously arise in biological systems. His research is driven by the goal to prove a hypothesis he first felt intuitively at the age of 24: “there is ‘order for free’ out there, a spontaneous crystallisation of order out of complex systems, with no need for natural selection or any other external force” (quoted in R. Lewin 1999, p. 25). His work on this hypothesis has led to many important advances.

James Lovelock is an unusual figure in the sometimes rather homogeneous world of science. In a scientific community founded on team working and institutions, he works alone from his rural home. While many start from others' work and are content to make advances through small steps, he is deeply committed to starting from experimental data and drawing his own, often radical, conclusions. Lovelock writes in a highly accessible, almost poetic fashion, and is famous for his adoption of a vivid metaphor (Gaia) to describe his ideas; yet he has worked for decades carrying out detailed experimental science and even designing and building innovative instruments for his experiments. He is one of the UK's most eminent scientists, has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1974 and received several prestigious international awards, yet he is regarded by some of the scientific establishment as something close to a crank. He is deeply involved in the environmental movement and has inspired many people in it, but he is also held in considerable suspicion by many environmentalists.

Kurt Lewin was a visionary and deeply original thinker. He was highly committed both to social change and to developing theories about human behaviour, summing up the connection between the two in saying that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin 1951, p. 169). The list of ideas that he originated is long, notably including group dynamics and action research; he also had a huge impact through institutions he founded, projects he worked on, and students he taught. Often described as the founder of social psychology, Lewin can also been seen as a key bridge between Gestalt psychology (a predecessor to systems thinking), and several early traditions in systems thinking. Burnes (2004, p. 981) has summed up his interests and values as follows: Lewin was a humanitarian who believed that only by resolving social conflict, whether it be religious, racial, marital or industrial, could the human condition be improved. Lewin believed that the key to resolving social conflict was to facilitate learning and so enable individuals to understand and restructure their perceptions of the world around them.

One of the greatest contributions made to a humanistic approach to work organisation started with a coal mine. In the late 1940s, Eric Trist, social psychologist and deputy chairman of the Tavistock Institute in London was supervising a postgraduate industrial fellow called Ken Bamforth, a former miner. The fellows were encouraged to return to their former industries and report on developments. When Bamforth did this, Eric Trist later said, “he came back to London very excited and said, ‘You must come and see what is happening up there, because I think it has something to do with us.’ So I went up with him to Yorkshire, went down the mine, and came up a different man” (Fox 1990, p. 260).

Chris Argyris is a theorist and practitioner of organisational development. For more than 50 years, he has written, taught and acted as a consultant in helping people and organisations to learn. He has published over thirty books and a large number of articles, many written with a high degree of scientific rigour, but his focus has always been on research that can be applied within organisations – a strong “commitment to the development of actionable knowledge” (Argyris 2003, p. 1190). He has described the starting point of his work as follows: I began my career with a dedication to reducing injustices. The injustices that intrigued me were those that inhibited the expansion of liberating alternatives. Soon I narrowed my focus even further to those injustices created by human beings when they were acting to reduce the injustices. The more that I studied these phenomena, the more I found myself studying processes that were self-sealing, compulsively repetitive, and non-interruptible and changeable by the very people who created them. (Argyris 2003, p. 1178).

Donald Alan Schön was a pre-eminent scholar of professional practice and learning. He is most celebrated for his work on the reflective practitioner and on organisational learning. He made significant contributions to the fields of education, management, urban planning, and design. His original intellectual home, however, was philosophy and throughout his career he regarded himself as a “displaced philosopher” (Waks 2001, p. 37). He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the philosopher John Dewey's theory of inquiry, and as Sanyal (1998, p. 6) notes, “the Deweyian notion that all knowledge derives from practice remained at the heart of Don's formulation of the epistemological foundation of effective practice”.

Mary Catherine Bateson is a social anthropologist and linguist. She has written about topics including cross-cultural issues, social and individual learning, women's life patterns, ageing, family dynamics, AIDS, and the nature of knowledge. Her work is suffused with systems ideas, especially a highly-developed form of cybernetics. It is deeply humanitarian, and combines a strong respect for the individual with an awareness of wider forces to which they relate. She exhibits what might be called ‘documented embodiment’, as an individual who has taken systems ideas so deeply into herself that they influence all of her thinking and writing, and who has written at length about that process.