What are we looking at?
What new thing did general system theory say, and why did our view of problems change after it?
What is general system theory?
General system theory is one of the turning points of systems thinking in the twentieth century. The Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy put it forward, aiming to find principles common to all systems, whatever their type or field. He said himself that he coined the term around 1937; he had developed his theory of open systems in the 1930s; his first published articles on general system theory date from 1950; and his main book, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, appeared in 1968.
Bertalanffy saw that many phenomena, from a living cell to a human society, have a system-like structure, and that similar mathematical equations govern very different systems. He concluded that instead of studying each phenomenon separately, one should look for laws that govern the “whole”. In our own words: many analyses fail because they focus only on the parts and don’t understand the structure and the relations between them.
The specialist view and the systems view
The progress of science has divided the world into many specialties: physics, biology, psychology, sociology, engineering and so on. Each field sees the problem from its own angle. That is useful, but it sometimes loses the whole picture.
| Specialist view | Systems view |
|---|---|
| Focus on one component or process | Focus on the connections between components |
| Narrow but precise | Wide and integrative |
| Local solution | Structural, lasting solution |
| Suited to optimising one part | Suited to re-creating the whole system |
I think a systems analyst is someone who builds bridges between specialists.
Why are relations more important than individual parts?
Suppose in an organisation the marketing unit performs badly. A marketing specialist offers suggestions to improve advertising. A systems analyst might see that the real problem isn’t advertising but the poor connection between marketing and production. Very often the problem sits in the “relation between parts”, not in the parts themselves. This is the principle of holism: the whole is something beyond the heap of its parts (the popular phrase “more than the sum of the parts” is a modern paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics).
Where did this theory apply?
Bertalanffy’s theory became the basis of many of today’s fields and methods of analysis: systems management, information-system design, analysis of social structures, biological and medical systems, software modelling and simulation, and even parts of philosophy and art. It opened a way of thinking about problems that are complex, multi-dimensional, dynamic and interdisciplinary.