problem solving

We’ve all heard of the butterfly effect.

How the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can influence the direction of entire hurricanes.

This discovery feels at the same time profound and deeply terrifying. If something so small as a butterfly can have such a tremendous impact, what future effects and tragedies might my actions be manifesting today?

We’ll go about our days, carrying a narrow and short-sighted view of the world, enforced by our everyday demands and goals. However, occasionally we’ll come across encounters that open our eyes to the interconnected nature of the world, as well as just how complex and delicate it can be.

Systems thinking can be thought of as this way of viewing the world. One in which a particular focus is placed on the relationships between things, rather than just the things themselves.

A famous example from Russel Ackoff:

Imagine you’re building the world’s greatest car. You get all the world’s best cars into one room, and hire the world’s best engineers. For each of the car components, you get the engineers to select which one comes top. They might discover the Rolls-Royce engine is the best, and the Ferrari exhaust is the best, for example. Using this method for each of the other parts, you eventually create a list of all the best car parts in the world. You get the engineers to put all these components together and what do you get?

A useless, frankenstein monster. The parts just don’t fit. The Rolls-Royce engine just doesn’t work well with the Ferrari exhaust.

And suddenly it becomes clear. The properties of the car, lie not only in its individual components, but how they relate to each other and interoperate.

It’s important to realise that this idea relates not only to creating cars, but designing schools, making policy decisions, and even choosing pets…

If you’re looking for a brief overview of what systems thinking is about, I would highly recommend watching this short video:

Holism vs. Reductionism

A key aspect within systems thinking is holism.

Holism comes from the greek word holos, meaning “whole”, and embodies the philosophical idea that systems (biological, cognitive, social etc.) and their properties should be viewed as wholes, and not just from a collection of parts.

“The whole is more than the sum of its parts” – Aristotle

Its polar opposite is reductionism – where we seek to understand a system by breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces, then adding these together. In other words – “the whole is equal to the sum of its parts”.

Our western scientific worldview, which greatly influenced the industrial age, tends to be highly biased towards the right side of this spectrum, placing a lot of emphasis on analysis and detail. This bias can become embedded in the design of the systems that surround us, from factories to schools.

Taking schools as an example, this bias has contributed to the creation of rigid, hierarchical education systems, using heavily factory-guided principles like batch production process and standardises tests to determine quality. What has this lead to? A system that favours:

• Conformity over diversity
• Adherence to rules over autonomy and self directed learning
• Memorisation over individual thinking
• Individuality over collaboration
• Success over the importance of failure and resilience

Part of the reason why this reductionist approach to designing our education system, has lead to so many undesired consequences, is that it’s the wrong approach for the wrong type of system – something I will discuss in the next section.

Finally, it’s important to stress that it’s not simply about universally favouring one approach over another, each has its advantages and disadvantages. Instead, a more useful way of viewing this is a constant balancing of both approaches, with a sensitivity to the specific problems and characteristics inherent in the system that you’re concerned with.

Understanding the Problem, and it’s Systemic Context

The universe can be viewed as fundamentally comprised of systems within systems.

Your home is on a street consisting of a collection of other homes. Your street makes up a part of a city-system, which itself is part of a nation-system etc…

Whenever we’re trying to address certain kinds of problems, how effective our solutions turn out will depend largely on the approaches and tools that we use, and how compatible that approach is with the characteristics of that system.

For example, a hammer is a tool that can effectively solve the problem of needing sharp objects to remain in walls. However, if we try using it to fix a persistent headache, it might be less effective.

3 Kinds of Systems

Broadly speaking, we find ourselves dealing with 3 types of systems:

1. Simple systems = few components, easy to predict cause and effect.
2. Complicated systems = lots of components, more variables but still possible to predict by analysing using cause and effect.
3. Complex systems = comprises networks of elements that are interconnected, autonomous and influence each other in unpredictable ways. This type of system is constantly in flux. Full understanding becomes impossible, and prediction too.

Your car key is simple. It has just a few components, and its properties are relatively easy to understand.

Your car is complicated. There are more parts that interact and more difficulty diagnosing problems. But an experienced mechanic would understand the function of each of the parts, be able to take it apart and put back together piece by piece, with the system operating very much like it did before.

Traffic is complex. You could drive up and down the same stretch of road hundreds of times, and the outcome each time would be different. There are different players that exist with their own autonomy, and I wouldn’t be able to predict how my journey might turn out with much precision.

For both simple and complicated systems, adopting a more reductionistic, analytical approach is most appropriate. As these systems are governed by cause and effect, breaking the system apart to understanding and ‘localising’ a problem tends to be highly effective.

However, when we’re dealing with complex systems such as social systems, or any living system in general, using a simple analytical approach towards understanding and designing solutions, tends to lead to lots of frustration and unintended consequences.

A recent example comes from our understanding of personal hygiene. This dimension of health relates to a sense of ‘cleanness’ and tends to involve us habitually zapping away all bacteria, other microorganisms, and dirt from the surface of our skin, using harsh detergents and chemicals. This attitude has fuelled the growth of a gigantic industry. However, supported by recent research surrounding the human microbiome, scientists have begun to discover that many of these microorganisms play an important role in our overall health. Considering more than half of the human body is comprised of non-human cells, suddenly zapping them all away might not seem like such a good idea after all.

By alternating between the reductionistic and holistic way of seeing, we begin to not only understand the functions of each of the human cells and other microorganisms in isolation, but also tie this understanding to appreciating their functions with the bodily ecosystem as a whole.

Our World, Today

When we take a look at some of the most pressing problems we face today – climate change, mass extinction, extreme global inequality – what do we notice? They’re all deeply complex and interconnected problems, involving the interplay of many different systems, and many different parties, each with their own distinct motivations and behaviours.

The magnitude and nature of these challenges call for creative, and holistic solutions that address these problems in systemic ways, not just short-term bandaids that temporarily mask the problem. Or as physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist Fritjof Capra describes as:

Creating systems that nurture earth’s inherent ability to sustain life.

Some promising examples of such systemic solutions include community energy cooperatives, sustainable agriculture practices, as well as the emergence of ecological design, all of which I’ll delve further into in future blog posts.

As for me, in my own small way, I’ll aim to contribute towards this movement by continuing my involvement in, and support of, communities in the rich Capra Course Community, as well as potentially getting involved in Systems Innovation’s initiation of community collaboration spaces in London. And of course, alongside all of this will be my personal journey of discovery and learning within this emerging field, which I hope to openly share with others so they can hopefully learn and benefit too.

Who knows, maybe each of our little actions towards this can, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, leading to a ripple effects that span far wider than our own consciousness can understand…