Book: Systemantics
Tagline: The Systems Bible
Author: John Gall
Find Online:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
Date Read: March 2017
Richard recommended this book to me when I was learning about systems theory, as a way to use a seemingly negative emotional approach to learning (e.g. how systems break) to talk about complex systems, instead of the more positive emotional information approaches you seem to see in educational materials about this subject.
it began to dawn upon the investigators that we humans do not yet understand the basic laws governing the behavior of complex organizations
The reader must imagine for him-or-herself at what cost in blood, sweat, and tears— and in time spent in deep observation of contemporary Systems—these simple statements have been wrung from the messy complexity of the real world.
•In similar vein, when the workers of Solidarity Union, in Poland, went on strike, they were striking, of course, for theright to strike. Theirs is the quintessential spirit of the Science of Systemantics.
malfunction is the rule and flawless operation the exception.
an attempt to make the experience bearable by means of humor and irony. Those are the qualities that people have called upon down through the ages to enable them to cope with the permanently provisional human situation.
Salvation, if it is attainable at all, even partially, is to be sought in a deeper understanding of the ways of all Systems, not simply in a criticism of the errors of a particular System.
Goal-oriented Man, the Upright Ape with the spear, is interested in the end-result. If the spear flies wide of the mark, Man is equally likely to trample it to bits in a rage or to blame the erratic flight on malevolent spirits. He is much less likely to undertake a critical analysis of hand- propelled missiles, and infinitely less likely to ponder the austere abstractions
As Humpty Dumptysaid to Alice (though in another context):It’s just a question of who is to be master, that’s all.
At all times there have been people who felt that things weren’t working out very well. This observation has gradually come to be recognized as an ongoing fact of life, an inseparable component of the Human Condition. Because of its central role in all that follows (being the fundamental observation upon which all further research into Systems has been based) it is known as the Primal Scenario. We give it here in full: THINGS (THINGS GENERALLY/ ALL THINGS/THE WHOLE WORKS) ARE INDEED NOT WORKING VERY WELL. IN FACT, THEY NEVER DID
In more formal terminology: SYSTEMS IN GENERAL WORK POORLY OR NOT AT ALL
More technically stated:[c. ][xiii] COMPLICATED SYSTEMS SELDOM EXCEED FIVE PERCENT EFFICIENCY
It is a perfectlygeneralfeature of Systems not to do what we expected them to do.
Systemantics, by contrast, is almost a form of Guerilla Theater.
More often it has the hands-on immediacy of the Apprentice’s grubby handbook of maxims, marked down with sweaty hands and stubby pencil in the heat of the experience itself.
Ain’t that the truth
If we are correct, our theorems apply to the steamship itself as well as to the crew who run it and to the company that built it.
Whereas before there was only the Problem—such as warfare between nations, or garbage collection—there is now an additional universe of problems associated with the functioning or merely the presence of the new system.
The sum total of problems facing the community has not changed. They have merely changed their form and relative importance. We require at this point adefinition: ANERGY. ANERGY-STATE. Any state or condition of the Universe, or of any portion of it, that requires the expenditure of human effort or ingenuity to bring it into line with human desires, needs, or pleasures is defined as an ANERGY-STATE.
Anergy is measured in units of effort required to bring about the desired change.
SYSTEMS OPERATE BY REDISTRIBUTING ANERGY INTO DIFFERENT FORMS AND INTO ACCUMULATIONS OF DIFFERENT SIZES
SYSTEMS TEND TO EXPAND TO FILL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE
The more one delves beneath the surface—the more one becomes committed to close observation and most importantly, to generalization from particular experience—the more one begins to attain insight into the true and deeper meanings of things.
•Many backward nations, whose greatest need is food to feed their people, sell their crops and bankrupt themselves to buy—not food, but advanced military hardware for the purpose of defending themselves against their equally backward neighbors, who are doing the same thing.
There is a world of difference, psychologically speaking, between the passive observation that Things Don’t Work Out Very Well and the active, penetrating insight that: COMPLEX SYSTEMS EXHIBIT UNEXPECTED BEHAVIOR
A LARGE SYSTEM, PRODUCED BY EXPANDING THE DIMENSIONS OF A SMALLER SYSTEM, DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE THE SMALLER SYSTEM
No, students of Systemantics, Positive Feedback into a large System is a dangerous thing. Remember, even though a System may function very poorly, it can still tend to Expand to Fill the Known Universe, and Positive Feedback only encourages that tendency.
Alternating positive and negative feedback[a. ] produces a special form of stability represented by endless oscillation between two polar states or conditions. In Human Systems, the phenomenon is perhaps best exemplified by certain committees whose recommendations slowly oscillate between two polar alternatives, usually over a period of some years.
The pragmatic Systems-student neither exhorts nor deplores, but merely notes thewaste of energyinvolved in pushing the wrong way against such trends.
SYSTEMS TEND TO MALFUNCTION CONSPICUOUSLY JUST AFTER THEIR GREATEST TRIUMPH
In point of fact, the System may be so thoroughly organized around the familiar response strategy that a new response would require extensive restructuring—something that Systems do with the greatest reluctance and difficulty.
PERFECTION OF PLANNING IS A SYMPTOM OF DECAY
The function performed by a System is not operationally identical to the function of the same name performed by a person. In general, a function performed by a larger System is not operationally identical to the function of the same name as performed by a smaller System.
The power of the Naming Effect should not be underestimated. It is literally the power to bring new “realities” into existence.
the Message is the Medium by which the System knows the World.
Wtf?
A true Systems-person can no more imagine inadequacy of sensory function than a Flatlander can imagine three- dimensional space.
The fraction Ro/Rs varies from zero (full awareness of outside reality) to unity (no reality getting through). It is known, naturally enough, as the COEFFICIENT OF FICTION. Positive Feedback (P.F.) obviously competes with Reality (R) for input into the System. The higher the P.F., the larger the quantity of Reality which fails to gain entrance into the System (Ro) and thus the higher the C.F.
THE BIGGER THE SYSTEM, THE NARROWER AND MORE SPECIALIZED THE INTERFACE WITH INDIVIDUALS
In very large Systems, the relationship is never with the individual at all, but with his Social Security number, his driver’s license, or some other paper phantom derived from an extremely specialized aspect of the person.
Why do we not say you are laboring under a delusion?
because it's a difference in level of conceptualization. a plane is executing a higher-level version of flying
A giant program to Conquer Canceris begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered,[xxxix] but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled “You and the War Against Cancer” have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. The cancerous multiplication of paperwork willnotbe regarded as a malignancy.
Escaping from involvement in a System is like passing over an invisible threshold; one does not know there is a threshold and one does not know that there is another universe on the other side until the transition takes place. Then there is the moment of shock as one Frame of Reference[d. ] collapses and another is installed. After that everything is quite clear again.
The reader is invited to ask him-or herself, Is it possible that I am seeing the world from inside a System? Am I, unbeknownst to myself, a Systems-person? The answer is always, Yes. The relevant question is, simply, Which System? At that moment one can graduate from being only a Systems-person to becoming a true Student of Systemantics.
Systems attract not only Systems-people who have qualities making for success within the System; they also attract individuals who possess specialized traits adapted to allow them to thrive at the expense of the System; i.e., persons who parasitizethe System.
The cessation of the actual struggle apparently may produce in the survivors a sudden disorientation, a loss of customary frame of reference, that has the quality of an hallucinatory response.
Denial, that powerful psychological process by which we simplynegateany part of Reality that gets in the way of our plans, is probably responsible.
A COMPLEX SYSTEM THAT WORKS IS INVARIABLY FOUND TO HAVE EVOLVED FROM A SIMPLE SYSTEM THAT WORKED
The parallel proposition also appears to be true:[g. ]
A COMPLEX SYSTEM DESIGNED FROM SCRATCH NEVER WORKS AND CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. YOU HAVE TO START OVER, BEGINNING WITH A WORKING SIMPLE SYSTEM
IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS, MALFUNCTION AND EVEN TOTAL NON-FUNCTION MAY NOT BE DETECTABLE FOR LONG PERIODS, IF EVER
a.k.a. insidiousness
Charlemagne, for example, in his desire to be fair to his three sons, divided his empire among them—an act that gave rise to France, Germany, and Alsace-Lorraine, and to more than a thousand years of strife.
Although “Bugs” is good, pithy Anglo-Saxon[a.] , the lack of a Standard English word for what we are talking about reflects the powerfulresistanceof our goal-oriented minds towards admitting the legitimacy or even the reality of impediments to our success.
Yet every Bug, no matter how humble, always gives us at least one important piece of information; namely, it tells us one more way in which our System can fail.
But there is a larger sense in which Bugs may be more than merely negatively involved in our welfare. Sometimes they represent a spontaneous offering of unsuspected capabilities of the System, a generous revelation of hidden vistas of alternative functioning not contemplated in the design specifications.
In the very moment when Dr. Fleming revised his Frame of Reference from “bug” (or “glitch” or “gremlin”) to “unsuspected behavioral capability,” the world of Antibiotics was born.
Being able to switch one’s Frame of Reference confers major advantages in dealing with Systems and/or their Bugs.
while drenching the human brain with drugs or jolting it with electricity may cause some temporary improvement in some areas of functioning (See Vending Machine Fallacy), the tasteful intervenor prefers more specific, more physiologic methods. Dipping a watch in honey may slow it down so it keeps better time, but a more elegant method is to adjust the escapement.
Simply put: Are we willing to subject our communications to the test of actual outcomes?
The astute Systems-Manager will do well to emulate the toddler. Any given System has many functions which it can perform only poorly and a few that it performs well. Our task, correctly understood, is to find out which tasks our System performs well and use it for those.
Trying to design a System in the hope that the System will somehow solve the Problem, rather than simply solving the Problem in the first place, is to present oneself with two problems in place of one.
Attempting to correct everything in one grand design is appropriately designated as Grandiosity.
The diagnosis of Grandiosity is quite elegantly and strictly made on a purely quantitative basis: How many features of the present System, and at what level, are to be corrected at once? If more than three, the plan is grandiose and will fail.
Because of this effect, anyone who identifies him/herself publicly as a “change agent” is self-convicted of incompetence. Changes will certainly occur as a result, but they are not likely to be the changes desired.
Stated otherwise, our Problem will remain intractable until we first solve the Meta-problem entitled, “Where’s the Problem?”; i.e., until we have correctly located the Problem on the Ladder of Logical Levels:
IF YOUR PROBLEM SEEMS UNSOLVABLE, CONSIDER THAT YOU MAY HAVE A META-PROBLEMIn what follows, we shall consider three logical possibilities:
(1) that the Problem lies in the inadequacy of our own efforts to elicit the desired behavior from our System (“The Problem in the Probe”);
(2) that the Problem is in fact a consequence of the correct (designed-in) functioning of our System (“The Problem in the Solution”);
(3) that the Problem lies in an inadequate formulation of the Problem in the first place (“The Problem in the Question”).
Finally, to integrate this with our previous knowledge, we observe that a thermostat is the point at which Self-reference is deliberately designed into the System.
Changing the System so that people will think, feel, and behave differently is, of course, what we are interested in at this point.
But as we have just seen, actually changing the structure of the System so as to Tame it is a difficult and rather obscure art. Could one perhaps bypass that difficult sequence, going directly to the Mental Model within people’s heads and changingthatwithout doing anything physical to the System itself?
Who wants to look at the world through the eyes of old error and illusion?
The old understanding was a metaphor; the new frame is also a metaphor. Creative reframing is the art of substituting useful metaphors for limiting metaphors.
When Reframing is complete, the Problem is not “solved”—it doesn’t even exist any more. There is no longer any Problem to discuss, let alone a Solution. In the fleeting moment of transition from the old Model to the New, one has a brief opportunity to realize consciously what most of us seldom think about, namely, that labels such as the above areartifactsof terminology, not permanent attributes of the Universe or of Human Nature. With that awareness we are no longer locked into models that offer no solution. We are free to seek out ever more appropriate Models of the Universe.
IF YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE SYSTEM, CHANGE THE FRAME—IT COMES TO THE SAME THING
What is needed now is the capacity to re-write the procedure manual on short notice, or even (most radical change of all) to change goals.
The word “Solution” is only a fancy term for the Response of System “A” (ourselves) to System “B” (the Problem). And it’s a misleading word, because it implies something that can be done once and for all.
Nevertheless, with long-continued practice in interacting with familiar Systems, moments can come when our interactions can take on the qualities suggested—when the partners are no longer simply dancing, but also communicating about changing the dance itself to make it more satisfying for both. At such rare moments we have reached the level called Cybernetics of Cybernetics[cxlviii] or Ultrastability,[cxlix] the level of Autonomy, of Spontaneity, of Creative Change.