This post, is by way of capturing my ongoing conversation with Roger Duck concerning the meaning of ‘a whole system’.

The word ‘system’ means many different things to different people, so its worth an exploration of what we mean by it:

There is an even more fundamental communication issue than terminology at work when it comes to ‘whole systems’. We all have underlying assumptions, which we  rely on being unspoken but shared when communicating with others. One such common assumption is that the world, and everything within it, is made up of ‘things’ – people, houses, forests, cities etc. If I think about a ‘thing’ it tends to conjure the image of a static object and I am drawn into examining it. To understand ‘whole systems’ it is necessary to suspend the idea that ‘things’ are the fundamental building block for a moment or two and try thinking of the world as being made up of ‘happenings’ dynamic processes which are going on all the while, overlapping each other and with complex patterns of interaction taking place between them.

I find the simple trick of adding ‘ing’ to a word can help change my thought patterns: so not boat but boating, not rain but raining, not breath but breathing. OK it doesn’t work for some words, so you may need to add an ‘ing’ word as in: not violin but playing the violin.  ‘Ing’ words tend to bring along a context with them, so for comparison, if I think about rain I might focus on a rain-drop in isolation, whereas, if I think about ‘raining’ I can’t help but imagine a broader and diverse context: so, raining in the garden and bouncing off the path and refreshing the plants or swelling a river, or falling from a dark cloud or filling a reservoir etc. Thinking about the world in terms of ‘interconnected happenings’ causes me to consider the uncertain future based on a broader context than the thing itself: will it stop raining before I want to go out? Will this river breach its banks and flood? I am not drawn to look inside the thing ‘the raindrop’ but to consider its effect on everything it has contact with and that is in contact with it. If you can get the knack of looking at the world through this particular pair of spectacles, then envisaging ‘whole systems’ follows naturally.

So getting back to the word ‘systems’, what are the other meanings which need to be distinguished? A very common one is a ‘technical system’. In a computer industry context ‘the system’ is usually the combination of software and hardware and communications technology that accomplishes a set of specific tasks on behalf of some users. Note the people involved (the users) are not part of this system – the system is ‘a thing’ which can be defined and the users with their unknowable possible range of actions are excluded from the system, so that the technical functioning can be specified exactly and the system can operate regardless of the context it is being used in.

This concept of a technical system, distinct from it users leads on to another possible misunderstanding of the term system. Technical systems sometimes fail, because they have not been considered as a whole. They may have been segmented into components at an early stage, with rudimentary inter-communication capabilities and over time these components have individually evolved to do new and different things, so they have become like a jigsaw where the pieces have changed shape independently destroying the overall picture. This overall picture can be termed ‘a whole technical system’ as opposed to ‘a set of components’ which may or may not fit together well.

Another common use of the term ‘system’ is to identify a clerical procedure, e.g. the objective setting and review system. This, as in the technical use, excludes the people who perform the procedure. Such procedures can be defined, clearly and unambiguously, and act as a definition of what happens regardless of the context in which they operate. This idea can then be scaled up to a set of such procedures, so an administrator might talk about ‘the whole business system’ meaning all the office procedures combined and operating across all departments.

Another use of the word ‘system’ is in thinking, as for example a system of philosophy based on a number of assumptions and building into a ‘whole system of thought’. Again the system can be constructed and operates regardless of context.

There are no doubt many other examples: economic system, political system etc. which could embrace the term ‘whole system’ to mean the unification of a number of components within a bigger picture. The key difference between all these examples and ‘whole system’ as used here is that all these examples limit the domain of interest and can be described by the term ‘systematic’.  Our use of the term ‘whole systems’ expands to include all relevant domains and to understand how aspects of different domains interact together within the current context and in potential futures.

So finally looking at ‘whole systems’ as used in this post – there are some clear differences emerging from these examples of other uses of the term.

Whole systems, in the way we mean the term, are:

• Dynamic and unpredictable – they always include everything (including people) that play an essential part in the achievement of the systems objectives – and people always introduce unpredictability.
• Operating within a context and cannot be understood without their context
• Communicating with their context in a fully interactive manner, proactively and reactively and co-operatively, responding to feedback and learning – again introducing unpredictability. Their component systems are also interconnected and interact together in proactive, reactive and co-operative ways.
• Multi-domain – including all aspects involved in addressing their objectives, and so can be said to be holistic and in that sense ‘whole’
• Can be described by the term ‘systemic’

So finally, given this broad definition of whole systems, how can any individual get a good understanding of them?  The answer is that understanding does not come from logical deduction in one head, but through sharing and combining the different perspectives from all the stakeholder viewpoints. Our approach to addressing this is one of developing shared models of interacting “happenings” that reflect the underlying dynamics of the system of interest in-context. This is done in a way that enables everyone to understand how their own perspective on the system relates to the perspectives of others.