Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

Michael C. Jackson

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119118398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

From the winner of the INCOSE Pioneer Award 2022 The world has become increasingly networked and unpredictable. Decision makers at all levels are required to manage the consequences of complexity every day. They must deal with problems that arise unexpectedly, generate uncertainty, are characterised by interconnectivity, and spread across traditional boundaries. Simple solutions to complex problems are usually inadequate and risk exacerbating the original issues.

Leaders of international bodies such as the UN, OECD, UNESCO and WHO — and of major business, public sector, charitable, and professional organizations — have all declared that systems thinking is an essential leadership skill for managing the complexity of the economic, social and environmental issues that confront decision makers. Systems thinking must be implemented more generally, and on a wider scale, to address these issues.

An evaluation of different systems methodologies suggests that they concentrate on different aspects of complexity. To be in the best position to deal with complexity, decision makers must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches and learn how to employ them in combination. This is called critical systems thinking. Making use of over 25 case studies, the book offers an account of the development of systems thinking and of major efforts to apply the approach in real-world interventions. Further, it encourages the widespread use of critical systems practice as a means of ensuring responsible leadership in a complex world. The INCOSE Pioneer Award is presented to someone who, by their achievements in the engineering of systems, has contributed uniquely to major products or outcomes enhancing society or meeting its needs. The criteria may apply to a single outstanding outcome or a lifetime of significant achievements in effecting successful systems.

Comments on a previous version of the book:

Russ Ackoff: 'the book is the best overview of the field I have seen'

JP van Gigch: 'Jackson does a masterful job. The book is lucid...well written and eminently readable'

Professional Manager (Journal of the Chartered Management Institute): 'Provides an excellent guide and introduction to systems thinking for students of management'

Part I
Systems Thinking in the Disciplines

Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self‐effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance

(Heine 1834)

Part I traces the emergence of systems thinking in philosophy, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences. The reason for concentrating on these broad fields of knowledge is that it demonstrates the necessity of systems thinking for making intellectual progress in a wider context than that of individual disciplines. A downside is that individual disciplines impacted by systems thinking, such as geography and political science, are ignored if not central to that purpose. Chapter 1 is a review of the long engagement that has taken place between philosophy and systems thinking. Chapter 2 looks at the physical sciences, the refinement of the “scientific method,” and at how that method (based on “reductionism”) enabled spectacular progress to be made in science and technology in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It notes, however, that newer discoveries in general relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory are leading to a rethink of the traditional scientific method and requiring the physical sciences to embrace systems ideas. In contrast to the physical sciences, the life sciences, specifically biology and ecology, seemed to require a commitment to systemic thinking from their early days. As a result, they have provided a rich resource of systems concepts and played a major part in establishing systems thinking as a “trans‐discipline.” This is the topic of Chapter 3. In Chapter 4, the focus is on social theory, a field that makes significant use of systems ideas developed elsewhere but has also come up with its own original contributions to the systems approach. The treatment of theoretical matters in Part I is designed to illuminate and guide the practical employment of the systems methodologies that are detailed in Part III.

1
Philosophy

In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts …

(Aristotle n.d., 350 BCE, VIII: line 1)

1.1 Introduction

Fritjof Capra (1975) has, for some time, been pointing to similarities between the holistic understanding of the world supplied by Eastern philosophy and the findings of modern science. Churchman regarded the I Ching, with its emphasis on dynamic changes of relationship between interconnected elements, as presenting the oldest systems approach (Hammond 2003, p. 13). Boulton et al. (2015) claim Daoism, with its sense of interconnection and co‐creation, as a precursor of complexity theory. This book will restrict itself to the Western intellectual tradition. It is upon Western sources that systems practitioners have, probably to their detriment, almost exclusively drawn. As with so much in this tradition, we owe the first attempts to use systems ideas to the ancient Greeks. von Bertalanffy (1971) and Prigogine (1997) cite the pre‐Socratic philosopher Heraclitus as an influence. More specifically, Aristotle (n.d.) 350 BCE was the first to imply that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” Indeed, he reasoned, the parts only obtain their meaning in terms of the purpose of the whole. The parts of the body make sense because of the way they function to support the organism. Individuals can only find meaning in helping the state to achieve its purpose. The other great master in the Greek philosophical tradition, Plato, also found value in employing systems ideas across different domains. There is a Greek word kybernetes meaning the art of steersmanship. The word referred principally to the control of a vessel, but Plato (1999, pp. 230–231) used it to draw comparisons with steering the ship of state. Both uses imply regulation, which is why the name cybernetics was given to the new science of “communication and control” in the 1940s.

1.2 Kant

Moving forward two millennia, to the latter part of the eighteenth century, we reach Immanuel Kant. Kant is often seen as the greatest philosopher of the modern era and provided the Enlightenment with its motto: Sapere aude! (Dare to know!). Knowledge should be based solely on reason rather than superstition and tradition. Kant's work is significant for systems thinking for three reasons. First, he thought that science could obtain true knowledge, as it had with Newtonian physics, and he wanted to show why this was the case. He also wanted to understand the limitations of science. The second reason lies in his interest in “organicism” as a complementary approach to mechanistic thinking, especially in the study of nature. Third are his arguments about the capacity of humans to generate principles of moral conduct because, uniquely, they possess “the autonomy of the will.”

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sought to expose the shortcomings of both “rationalism” and “empiricism” as approaches to gaining knowledge. Rationalists, such as Descartes, believe that it is possible to employ cogent thinking alone to arrive at knowledge about the nature of things. In Kant's view using rational thought on its own leads to contradictions, for example, to proofs that God exists and doesn't exist. Reason has to be grounded in experience if it is to yield true knowledge. Empiricists (e.g. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) believe that all knowledge has to be derived directly from experience through the senses. Kant thought that this was too subjective and opened the door to skepticism because our senses can easily deceive us. We need something more certain to rely on. Kant used the famous phrase: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions [perceptions] without concepts are blind” (quoted in Kemp 1968, p. 16).

If we are to overcome the weaknesses of rationalism and empiricism, we require, Kant says, a revolution in philosophy akin to that of Copernicus in cosmology (Kemp 1968). Instead of seeing knowledge as dependent upon our minds representing what actually exists in reality, we should see it as based upon what we perceive conforming to the nature of the mind. It is because all human minds structure the experiences they receive in a particular way that shared perceptions and knowledge are possible. This notion of mind as the creator of reality becomes clearer if we consider the latest brain research. According to Armson:

My senses receive 400 thousand million bits of data every second. My brain only deals with 2000 bits per second so I only notice a very small fraction – a half a millionth of one percent – of what I see, hear and smell. More extraordinary still is the observation that the 100 bits per second that trigger my visual perception are not enough to form any image of what is going on around me. My brain fills in the deficiency. It is hard to defend any claim to an objective view under such circumstances.

(Armson 2011, loc. 975)

The world does not present itself to us as already organized. The mind must play an active role for humans to experience it as they do.

In pursuing this argument, Kant requires a distinction between “phenomena,” things as they appear to our senses, and “noumena,” things as they actually are in themselves. Knowledge is possible because there is an inevitable correspondence between our minds and things as they appear to us. This arises because our minds structure the sense impressions we receive in order that we can perceive them in the first place. Far from the mind being a tabula rasa (blank slate) upon which reality writes its script, it actually provides the framework that makes experiences possible. According to Kant, the human mind possesses “sensibility,” which delivers experiences, and “categories” which organize those experiences and provide understanding. There are two elements of sensibility, space and time, which supply the mind with perceptions. There are 12 ordering categories, which Kant derives from Aristotle's logic, with four broad classes of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, each divided into three subclasses. Examples of the categories are “substance” and “cause.” The idea of substances with attributes and the idea of universal causation are not given to us in experience but are provided by the mind and impose order on our perceptions. Since these structural features of the mind are innate in human beings, the world appears to all people in essentially the same form. William Golding's (1955) novel The Inheritors is a brilliant attempt to capture what the world might have looked like to Neanderthal people in contrast to our world. In the case of the Neanderthal mind, the sensibilities and categories are not quite fully established.

In short, we can only have the experiences we have because of our minds, and so there is a necessary correspondence between the structure of the mind and the way the world appears. Logic, mathematics, and sciences such as physics, Kant argues, also depend on the concepts of space and time and the 12 categories, and it is this that makes it possible for them to be successful and to add to our stock of knowledge. They are able to produce knowledge that is universally true. This is the case even though we can never have access to the external world that provides the things we sense, i.e. the noumena or things in themselves. We will never know about the world of noumena. We are human beings who observe the world through our senses so we can only ever know things as they appear. Scientific knowledge is only possible because it restricts itself to elucidating what the mind makes available through the senses.

We now have a reason, although admittedly a topsy‐turvy one, for accepting the knowledge produced by science. But what are, for Kant, the limits of scientific knowledge? Clearly, it carries no weight in fields such as psychology or in answering metaphysical questions about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and free will. This is because the subject matters of psychology and metaphysics lie beyond what we can observe with our senses and so what science can explore on the basis of space and time and the categories. As Kant argued, thoughts without content are empty. We can prove anything and so are led into contradiction. That does not mean that reflection on these matters is pointless, just that in the case, for example, of seeking principles to guide human conduct, we have no choice but to venture beyond the knowledge that science can provide.

It is now possible to consider the second reason for Kant's importance for systems thinking. At the time that he was beginning his philosophical work, the mechanistic view, insisting that all life forms had remained the same since their creation, was being questioned from an “organicist” perspective. Kant was much influenced by this thinking and agreed that it was impossible to provide a mechanical account of organic processes such as change, growth, and development. The vitality and diversity of nature seemed to require a different kind of explanation that accepted the emergence of new and more complex organisms. As he wrote: “Are we in a position to say: Give me matter and I will show you how a caterpillar can be created?” (quoted in Mensch 2013, loc. 234). Kant was now in a dilemma because his arguments for what constituted scientific knowledge, later set out in the “Critique,” only permitted mechanical explanations. There seemed to be a requirement for organicist thinking in the “life sciences” but using it meant it was impossible to attain the same certainty as in mathematics and physics.

Kant returned to this issue in earnest in his Critique of Judgement. In terms of scientific reasoning, he argued, it is indeed impossible to support organicism because this would take us “beyond the mechanism of blind efficient causes” (quoted in Kemp 1968, p. 114). On the other hand, using a simple example, biologists are not going to get very far in studying the human heart if they restrict themselves to the question of “how did this come about?” and ignore the question of “what is this for?” Teleological explanation employing a form...