The Systems Paradigm: A Different Way of Seeing
A paradigm is a standard, perspective, or set of ideas that form a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular domain. The systems paradigm is a coherent set of basic concepts and axioms that form the worldview underlying systems theory.
Conceptual frameworks form a group of concepts that are broadly defined and systematically organized to provide a focus and a tool for the integration and interpretation of information. A conceptual framework forms the conceptual or schematic structure to a theory.
Why a paradigm?
Before any kind of constructive inquiry into the world around us can be conducted, a number of basic philosophical questions need to be answered. These include basic ontological questions—what is the nature of being? How does causality work? And basic epistemological questions—how do we know something and how can we prove that we know it?
Every coherent body of knowledge needs to provide some kind of answer to these questions, which will then form the basis to that conceptual framework.
Subjective vs objective
The systems paradigm breaks down the firm dichotomy between 'objective and subjective', positing that the subjective dimension of the individual interpreter should be of equal importance to our understanding of the world.
Systems thinking sees any knowledge of the world as a product of an interaction between the conceptual system used by the individual or community and the objective phenomena being observed.
To gain a fuller understanding of the world, one must both question and develop the subjective framework being used as well as what is being studied.
To do this, it is important that the assumptions, paradigm, and models used in an inquiry are made fully explicit so that everyone can examine the assumptions and bias that may distort the process. Systems thinking places great emphasis on recognizing and asking:
- How do I see the world?
- How do other people see the world?
- How do those models and assumptions that we all hold shape and create our interactions and the world around us?
One of the central tenets of systems thinking can be summed up in the simple statement:
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
That is to say, a recognition that how we see the world creates how we act in the world, which creates the world around us, which then feeds back to present us with challenges—all of which are the product of our subjective interpretation.
Thus for systems thinking there needs to be a balanced emphasis on the subjective models and assumptions as on the objective inquiry that we are engaged in.
Synthesis and analysis
Analysis is a process of inquiry that proceeds by breaking systems down and trying to understand the whole in terms of the properties and interactions between the elementary parts in isolation from its environment.
Systems thinking is characterized as being what is called holistic—it always refers to the whole system or environment as the most appropriate frame of reference for understanding something.
In order to understand some component or system, we must understand:
- The context that it is a part of
- Its interaction with other systems
- Its functioning within the whole environment
The process of reasoning that follows from this is called synthesis. Synthesis is the opposite from analysis in that it means putting things together. It is the method of inquiry used within the holistic approach, whereby we look at the relations between things and how, when we combine them, we get the emergence of new levels of organization.
Linear and non-linear causality
The linear view
A central part of the analytical paradigm is the idea of linear causality. The primary endeavor of modern science has been to control for external variables, to isolate one or two input variables that are thought to cause some effect within the system.
These cause and effect relations are encoded in equations and thought to describe how the system behaves. The central aim of the analytical paradigm is to ignore weaker influences from the environment and develop a model based on what are considered to be key observations—the primary driving variables causing change within the system's state.
The non-linear view
Systems thinking, in contrary, is focused on non-linear causality—where multiple factors affect an outcome as they work together synergistically in a networked fashion to generate a combined result that is greater, or less, than the sum of their effects in isolation.
A central idea here is that of emergence. An event may not have any direct cause. Instead, within the systems paradigm, many events are seen as emergent phenomena—not caused by any one thing but instead emerging out of the interaction between many things.
Relations vs components
Relationships between parts are given ontological emphasis more than the parts themselves.
Relationships are the connections and interdependencies.
Analysis is focused on components—as if they are the primary actors effecting change in the environment.
The systems paradigm instead would state that the relationships and the underlying context change the environment.
This shift in perspective—from components to connections, from isolation to context, from linear to non-linear—is at the heart of what makes systems thinking a fundamentally different way of understanding the world around us.
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