Systems Thinking: Airplanes and other organisms.

Growing up around a career Air Force father who, for a while investigated aircraft crashes, gave us boys around the Fouro-senior household an interesting jump on several concepts. Once we grew bored with the too-cool crash site photos we'd occasionally see, we actually thought enough to ask: How do you figure out what happened?

His usual answer: "We're good guessers."

He was only half kidding. What he'd explain was that it took certain knowledge of what things would and wouldn't do--metals, aerodynamics, people in stressful situations, weather, etc--and then, you begin to ask yourself and your team questions as if you had no clue about those things.

As you can imagine, crash sites were pretty messy locales. The key, he'd say in a zen-like manner, was to put things together as they seemed to want to go, not as they were designed to go. (Quizzical looks ensue.) To ease our pain, he'd call an aircraft "a complex system." (Well "Duuh.") But then he'd point out that systems, as we understand and are usually taught them, are designed to regulate things into a bland, predictable paste--or something like that. "That kind of thinking is a trap', he told us. The more "safely" designed that airplanes were becoming--this was in the late 60s, early 70s--the more they were failing unexplainably. Responsibilty for safety and the interpreting "feel" that pilots used to guage the relative stability of their craft at any given time was being taken away from them.

Although he was an engineer, he spoke of aircraft as being organic things. (Pilots will get this. Motorcyclists and others, too.) But, he explained, man-made systems inherently remove the organic craft and attention that many complex tasks require, and replace them with rules. And rules too often promote a false sense of order and mastery. As airspeeds were increasing, pilots were becoming complacent to the point of distraction. And failures, because of this lack of holistic, seat of the pants connection to their craft--their complex system--now meant two things: Number 1, Pilots became complacent and unable to react quickly enough to number 2: A failure that had progressed too far in sequence, from a little thing to a big thing, too rapidly to recover from. Calm to blind confusion in a nanosecond. "Safer planes", but more fatalities from more previously recoverable failures.

Okay, but how do you figure it out after the fact, or better still, prevent it from happening? More zen: Embrace the idea that small things can have big effects. And that everything has a pattern. And. that rust never sleeps. Altough we weren't Jewish, he had a favored phrase from the Talmud: "The invisible is more existent than all the visible things." That was his way of telling us "don't look to the rules, look for the patterns." If you can't see them, you're looking too closely, and if you can't find them, you'll never make a "good guesser."

Today, my brother flies a Bombardier and does his best to see the invisible. I look for small things at ground level.

From Delta Perfomance Systems

System Dynamics

How often have we heard it said that today’s problems are the result of yesterday’s solutions? In Systems Thinking terminology this scenario would be classified as a Shifting the Burden structure. Shifting the burden structures are very common in our lives, usually taking the form of obvious symptoms crying out for immediate attention - which, more often than not, makes the problem disappear only to appear again later, somewhere else in the system! Shifting the burden is just one of a number of systems archetypes which forms the basis for Systems Thinking which is, in essence, a different perspective to problem solving.

System Behaviour

The essence of systems thinking is that structure influences behaviour or, put another way, when placed in the same system, different people tend to produce similar results. The reason for this is that there are a number of ‘rules’ which seem to be true of all complex systems . . .

• Many of today’s problems are the result of yesterday’s ‘solutions’; Solutions which merely shift the problem from one part of the system to another often go unnoticed because the people who fixed the first problem are usually, particularly in complex systems, different from those who inherit the new one.

• Systems resist change; In systems terminology this is called ‘compensating feedback’ and is typical of many government interventions, such as food assistance to developing countries, where the initial increase in food availability is compensated for by reduced deaths, increased population and, eventualy, more malnutrition.

• Faster is slower; All natural systems, such as ecosystems, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth. This rate is always less than the fastest possible rate. When growth accelerates the system seeks to compensate by slowing down.

• Cause and effect are not closely related in space and time; This is one of the fundamental differences between the reality of complex systems and our own ways of thinking.

• Small changes can produce big results; The main incentive for systems thinking is to find where these small changes should take place . . .

For much, much more on complex systems and putting the bits together, Bellinger's Musings - Systemsthinking.org