Lessons From Systems Thinkers: The Systems Thinker Series, #7

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Table of Contents

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Introduction

Norbert Wiener

Warren Mcculloch

Gregory Bateson

W. Edwards Deming

Margaret Mead

Karl Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

Jay W. Forrester

Peter M. Senge

Professor Russell L. Ackoff

Peter B. Checkland

Ervin László

References

Endnotes

Introduction

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Albert Einstein once asked this question, have you ever thought about how you think? A lot of people would say no. It’s not common for one to pause and think about their thoughts. Herein lies the problem. What Einstein pointed out with his question is that certain issues cannot be solved with the same kind of thinking that created those issues. Second - and third-guessing every thought crossing our mind is not a reasonable expectation. It is time-consuming and, frankly, tiring. What we can do, however, is learn new thought patterns and use them to our benefit. The rewired thinking path I’m talking about is called systems thinking. My mission in this book is to present you the evolution of this cognitive assessment style through the stories of the people who asked hard questions and developed better solutions to the problems they were facing.

Today’s scientific exploration has come a long way from where it used to be. In the past, science tended to look at events as individual occurrences that seemingly happened in isolation. Different science fields would concentrate on the event level without seeing how to fit it into the bigger picture. It is strange to carefully study, examine, and report on what you had observed about one puzzle piece without ever looking at the whole puzzle, isn’t it? Well, pre-modern science functioned similarly.

Different fields of science have evolved throughout the years, and there has been a paradigm shift in data assessment. Scientists are still concerned with carefully examining individual events, but now looking at how it fits into the whole picture is also relevant. Things are more often interdependent than independent. Many scientific fields shifted from deconstructing elements to their particles to analyzing their dynamics and working-togetherness.

General System Theory -and later systems thinking - didn’t want to abandon the foundation of knowledge of any field of science. It aimed to be transdisciplinary. Each field would bring its expertise to the table. They would actively engage in working together to create a common base of methods and for all scientific disciplines to share.

General Systems Theory wanted to expand the tent; to be more inclusive of knowledge from all areas. To stop being so focused on the little pieces that seeing the bigger picture becomes impossible.

Today systems thinking – while its methodology has changed and refined throughout the years - is actively used in politics, economics, sociology, demographic analysis, and environmental studies. This book will tell the story of how systems thinking as a field of study came into being and evolve throughout the decades. It will present the thoughts and contributions of eleven great minds whose ideas were vital to develop this critical thinking method.

Norbert Wiener

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Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who attained renown due to formulating some of the most significant contributions to mathematics in the 20th century. His expansion of the field led to the development of cybernetics, which examines the interaction of feedback loops and behavior.

Born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, he showed a gift for mathematics early and graduated from high school at the age of 11.[i] He then attended Tufts College and graduated with a BA in Mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14. After spending a year at Harvard as a graduate student in zoology, he realized laboratory work was not his forte and transferred to a graduate degree in Philosophy. At 17, he graduated from Cornell with his graduate degree and returned to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. He earned his degree at the age of 19 after successfully defending his dissertation on mathematical logic. He traveled first to England to study mathematical logic at the University of Cambridge and then to the University of Göttingen in Germany to study differential equations, both on a grant from Harvard. He published his first paper in the mathematical journal Messenger of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1913.[ii]

During World War I, he could not enlist due to his poor eyesight. He tried a variety of jobs over the following five years, including being a teacher at the University of Maine, a writer for an encyclopedia, an apprentice engineer for General Electric, a journalist for the Boston Herald, and a mathematician in the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. In 1919, he was hired as an instructor for the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) around the time it started building towards being a center for enhanced learning in science and technology. He remained at MIT on the faculty until his retirement. During the 1920s, he was involved with work on what is now referred to as stochastic processes and the theory of Brownian motion and generalized harmonic analysis. [iii]

During World War II, Wiener worked on issues surrounding aiming guns at a moving target. This experience led to the creation of Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, first appearing as a classified report. Wiener became a co-discoverer of the theory of the prediction of stationary time series. This work also allowed him to develop the concept of cybernetics and the Wiener Filter.[iv]

Weiner published his book Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. His popular scientific book helped him become renowned in the scientific community. Wiener continued working at cybernetics and philosophized about it all his