What is a System?

– a set of things working together as parts o a mechanism or an interconnecting

network
– A set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an
organized scheme or method
– A collection of elements or components that are organized for a common
purpose

Meadows (2018)
– a system is a set of things - people, cells, molecules, or whatever -
interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior
over time.
– The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside
forces
– An outside event may unleash system’s behavior, but the same outside event
applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.
– The system, to a large content, causes its own behavior!
– Implications: virus; drug addiction
– Reflection: purest common sense; deeply unsettling
– These two somethings - a resistance to and a recognition of systems
principles - come from two kinds of human experience, both of which are
familiar to everyone
– Experiences:
– Training (vis-a-vis education)
– Common sense/Experience (vis-a-vis intuition): gut feeling
– Disasters are results from violating the rules of the system (2 cars coming
from different sides)

In Training,
– we have been taught to analyze, to use our rational ability, to trace direct
paths from cause to effect, to look at things in small and understandable
pieces, to solve problems by acting on or controlling the world around us
– That training, the source of much and societal power, leads us to see, for
example, the flu and drugs as the causes of our problems

With Experience,
– we all dealt with complex systems, long before we were educated in rational
analysis
– For example, we are complex systems and every person we encounter, every
organization, every animal, garden, tree, city, and forest is a complex system
– We have built up intuitively, without analysis, often without words, a practical
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understanding of how these systems work, and how to work with them

The Elephant and the Blind Men

– Each had felt one part out of the many; each had perceived wrongly
– This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a lesson but one that we often ignore:
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements
of which the system is made

System Structure and Behavior

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

– A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in
a way that achieves something
– A system consists of three kinds of things:
1. Elements
2. Interconnections
3. Function or purpose

What happens if system structure changes?

How to know whether you are looking at a a system or just a bunch of stuff:
A) can you identify parts?;
B) Do the parts affect each other?;
C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each
part on its own?; and perhaps
D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?
– imbalance system

Properties of Living Systems

1. Chemical uniqueness
2. Complexity and hierarchical organization
3. Reproduction (heredity and variation)
4. Possession of genetic program
5. Metabolism - maintain themselves by obtaining nutrients from their
environment; respiration and synthesis
6. Development - life cycle
7. Environmental interaction

Hierarchies of the Living Systems

– You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore
understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you
must also understand “and”
– An important consequence of hierarchical organization is that asa
components, or subsets, are combined to produce larger functional wholes,
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new properties emerge that were not present at the level below.

Transcending (Basic) Functions

Functions or processes that operates at all levels
1. Energetics
2. Behavior
3. Development
4. Evolution
5. Diversity
6. Integration; and
7. Regulation

Control Process or Feedback Mechanisms

– Population of rabbit and fox (indirectly proportional); negative feedback
mechanism
– taas ng araw, taas ng payong; positive feedback mechanism (exclusion
principle)

Disturbances in System Function and Processes

– Water cycle
– Cutting of trees, semento ng water

Systems Thinking
– a our world continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems
thinking will help us manage, adapts, and see the wide range of choices we
have before us
– It is a way of thinking that gives us the freedom to identify the roots of the
problem ????