Order

TABLE OF CONTENTS

§ A Change of Age
§ The Machine Age: Three New Beliefs
     The Universe Is Understandable
     Analysis as Inquiry
     Cause-and-Effect Thinking
     The Industrial Revolution: Technological Embodiment of the Machine Age
§ The Dawn of the Systems Age
     The Machine Age Challenged
     The Advent of Systems Thinking
     Expansionism vs. Reductionism
     Expansionism's Impact on Cause-and-Effect
     Systems Thinking and Business
     Communications in the Systems Age

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Russell L. Ackoff is widely recognized as a pioneering systems thinker. He has taught at Wayne University, Case Institute of Technology, and The Wharton School, where he is Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of the Management Sciences. He is currently chairman of the board at INTERACT: The Institute for Interactive Management. He is the author of numerous books, including Ackoff's Fables, Creating the Corporate Future, and The Democratic Corporation.

Lauren Johnson is publications editor at Pegasus Communications.

EXCERPTS

The Dawn of the Systems Age

The Industrial Revolution was the technological manifestation of Machine Age thinking. But, as happens with any age, certain problems cropped up during the Industrial Revolution that challenged the validity of the current worldview. Such problems are called dilemmas and cannot be solved within the prevailing view of the world.

The Machine Age Challenged

The first key dilemma facing the Machine Age stemmed from its premise that everything that occurs is the effect of a cause. This tenet implies that there can be no free will, no choice. In this scenario, everything we do is determined by something that preceded it. Yet we obviously do not believe this. We are convinced that we have the freedom to make choices, even though this belief is incompatible with the Machine Age worldview.

This contradiction is a dilemma, and in fact stood as a central problem of Western philosophy for three hundred years. We only began to approximate some kind of agreement or consensus about this at the turn of the twentieth century. During these years, largely through the influence of logical positivists, the dominant mode of philosophy at the time, people concluded that free will was an illusion granted by a merciful God who realized how dull our lives would be if we didn't have it. One philosopher who was blessed with the gifts of brevity and clarity captured this idea in two sentences. He said man is like a fly riding on the trunk of an elephant who thinks he is steering the elephant. The elephant doesn't mind, and it makes the ride more interesting.

Despite the seriousness of this dilemma about choice, people continued to believe in free will, and therefore the quandary persisted. It was a second dilemma that really rocked the Machine Age and put the first chink in its armor. In 1923 a young German physicist by the name of Werner Karl Heisenberg announced an incredible finding. To understand the magnitude of his discovery, remember that scientists saw the atom as having only two properties: mass and energy. Heisenberg discovered that it is impossible to determine the values of both those properties for a given atom at a given time. The more accurately we might determine an atom's mass, he showed, the less accurately we an determine its energy, and vice versa. In other words, we can know only one of an atom's properties perfectly at a time.

Heisenberg's demonstration challenged the entire concept of the understandability of the universe. Nevertheless, John Dewey, a leading American philosopher of the day, responded immediately to Heisenberg's challenge with his classical work, The Quest for Certainty (1929). Dewey agreed that a full understanding of the universe was unattainable, but he suggested that we see it as an ideal that we can continuously strive to approach. During the 1920s and 1930s, this idea began to gain currency among Westerners.

These questions about free will and the understandability of the universe began to erode the foundation of Machine Age thinking. Yet, it was the publication of several thought-provoking new works in the 1940s and 1950s that finally shattered that foundation. Two books—Cybernetics (1947), by Norbert Weiner, and General Systems Theory (1954), by Ludwig von Bertalanffy—introduced the first ideas of systems and dealt a fatal blow to Machine Age thinking.

The Advent of Systems Thinking

Why did the concept of systems finally encroach on Machine Age thinking? It has to do with the fundamental characteristics of systems. First, a system is a whole that consists of a set of two or more parts. Each part affects the behavior of the whole, depending on the part's interaction with other parts of the system. In addition, the essential properties that define any system are properties of the whole, and none of the parts have those properties. For example, an automobile has an essential property in that it can carry us from one place to another. No single part of an automobile—a wheel, an axle, a carburetor—can do that. Finally, once we take a system apart, it loses its defining characteristic. If we were to disassemble a car, for example, even if we kept every piece, we would no longer have a car. Why? Because the automobile is not the sum of its parts, it is the product of the parts' interactions.

To understand a system, analysis says to take it apart. But when we take a system apart, it loses all its essential properties. Furthermore, its parts lose their properties. The discovery that we cannot understand the nature of a system by traditional analysis forced us to realize that we needed another kind of thinking. This new way of thinking came to be called synthesis.

Synthesis is the polar opposite of analysis. To illustrate, analysis says that the first step to understanding a system is to take it apart. Consider a university, for example. If we wanted to use analysis to define a university, we might first say that it consists of colleges. Colleges, in turn, contain departments, and departments are made up of students, faculty, and areas of study. We would continue to reduce the university in this way until we arrived at its indivisible elements. Then we could try to build up our understanding of these elements into an understanding of the entire university.

With synthesis, we do exactly the opposite. To define a university using synthesis, we would first try to determine the larger system of which the university is a part; in this case, education. As a second step, we would try to understand that larger system as a whole. Finally, we would refine our understanding of the university by identifying its role or function in the containing system of which it is a part.

Analysis is useful for revealing how a system works—its structure. If we want to find out how an automobile works, we analyze it. We take it apart and see what each of the parts does. If we want to repair an automobile, we need to analyze it to discover which part is not working correctly. Analysis therefore gives us know-how, or knowledge.

By contrast, synthesis reveals why a system works the way it does. For example, we all know that the British drive on the left side of the street, and that in English automobiles, the steering wheel is on the right. Yet though we could take apart countless English automobiles, we would never arrive at an explanation for these facts. This is because the explanation does not lie inside the vehicles or their parts; it lies outside them, in the function that the automobiles perform. A book appeared recently that contained a possible explanation for British driving habits. The book said that the typical knight riding on horseback down an English country road was right-handed, and thus wielded his sword with his right hand. If he felt that he might meet a highwayman coming in the opposite direction toward him, and wanted to be in a position to defend himself, he would move to the left side of the road, so that his sword-wielding right hand could face the oncoming threat. The theory is that when the British developed their automobiles, they simply followed the example of the knight.

Of course, American society has never featured knights in shining armor, so when it came time to design automobiles, U.S. automakers came up with a totally different solution. As with British cars, the explanation for the design of American automobiles lies outside their physical structure, in their role or function. Early American automobiles were originally designed to carry six passengers. Why? No amount of analysis and taking apart an American car will reveal to us the reason for this design feature. We can find the answer in the fact that the average American family happened to be 5.6 people at the time the cars were designed. Since then, the average family size has dropped to 3.2, and, accordingly, American cars are getting smaller.

We have seen how systems thinking is more synthesis than analysis. Let's return to the example of the university to see where else systems thinking can lead us. Systems thinking says that to comprehend the university, we need to understand the educational system of which it is a part. But how do we grasp that educational system? The answer is that we look at the even larger system: society. But how do we understand society? Is there any end to this process, any one system that encompasses all other systems? Clearly, we would have reductionism in reverse if we continued in this direction.

In truth, this question becomes meaningless according to systems thinking. In the Systems Age, we have given up the notion that the universe is perfectly understandable. Given this premise, if there were one large, all-encompassing system, we could not expect to understand it, because if we did, we would achieve the goal of understanding the whole universe—-something we have agreed is impossible.