Reflection Why the Failure of Systems

Thinking Should Inform the Future

of Design Thinking (06.07.09)
Fred Collopy

Editors’ Introduction
Ten years ago, Fred Collopy published this short provocative essay
at Fast Company (June 7, 2009). Based on his experience working
with systems thinking Collopy offered the proponents of design
thinking a cautionary tale regarding the promise of thinking
holistically about complex phenomena. He also offered his sugges-
tions for a research agenda intended to harvest the insights of
inquiry and experimentation concerning systems thinking in a
productive and useful manner. A decade later, a review of confer-
ence programs, academic literature, the popular press, design
blogs, podcasts, and casual coffee shop discussions reveals that
interest in both systems thinking and design thinking continues to
grow. Design Issues has a long tradition of republishing important
documents and offering space for scholars and practitioners to
reflect upon mistakes made, lessons learned, and possibilities
identified. The editors of this journal consider Collopy’s essay to
be as timely now as when it first appeared. Mistakes are inevitable
but failure is not.

****
“You never learn by doing something right because you already know
how to do it. You only learn from making mistakes and correcting them.”
Russell Ackoff

Design and “design thinking” is gaining recognition as an impor-

tant integrative concept in management practice and education.
But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the
mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, “systems thinking,”
which shares many of the conceptual foundations of “design think-
ing,” promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but
it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If
systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in
management education over the last half of the 20th century, there
would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integra-
tive or design thinking.

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00538 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 2 Spring 2019 97
 Systems thinking, as written about and practiced by Russell
Ackoff, C. West Churchman, Peter Checkland and others, con-
tained within it many of the impulses that motivate the application
of design ideas to strategy, organization, society, and manage-
ment. Ideas such as engaging a broad set of stakeholders, moving
beyond simple metrics and calculations, considering idealized
options and using scenarios to explore them, shifting boundaries
to reframe problems, iteration, the liberal use of diagrams and rich
pictures, and tirelessly searching for a better set of alternatives
were all there. If the business and management community had
bought it, we would not be having the many discussions about
design, design thinking, and expanding management education
to engage the intuitive, to embrace values, to look beyond avail-
able choices. We would already be doing all of that and more. But
systems thinking, despite its wartime successes never really cap-
tured the imagination of business leaders. And we must learn from
its mistakes.
I have been an enthusiastic student and teacher of systems
thinking for almost three decades. I was a student of Russ Ackoff”s
and I did my PhD in decision theory largely because of the work of
pioneers in cybernetics and systems theory. I have taught systems
thinking to undergraduates, MBAs, and executives. I have heard
their objections to the arbitrariness of any particular system’s
boundaries, to the impossibility of balancing the incommensurable
objectives of a system’s many stakeholders, and to the difficulty in
identifying clear measures of a system’s performance. Still, many
of my students over the years have found much to take away. And I
receive email messages years after those courses have been com-
pleted that suggest that the ideas and techniques are useful and
important to some students.
Systems thinking started with an impulse that insights from
Gestalt psychology and biology might be useful in understanding
and affecting complex organizational and social problems. It devel-
oped into a large, highly interconnected theory that is itself a com-
plex system. Systems thinkers remain convinced that if managers
saw things through the lens of that theory, the world would
become better. But the number and sequence of things that must be
done has become so arcane that to master it seems all but impossi-
ble to the managers in question.
I recently spent two days at a workshop with around a
dozen architects and managers. The facilitator was one of Russ
Ackoff’s former colleagues at the Wharton School. It is a reflection
of what has become of systems thinking that it took most of the

98 DesignIssues: Volume 35, Number 2 Spring 2019

two days for the facilitator to explicate all that he thought we
needed to know before we could begin either critiquing or apply-
ing the ideas. In addition to obvious material on the nature of sys-
tems, we learned about chaos theory, living systems theory,
Santiago theories, the four foundations of systems methodology
(holistic thinking, operational thinking, interactive design, and
socio-cultural models), five systems principles (openness, emergent
properties, multi-dimensionality, counter-intuitiveness, and pur-
posefulness), the five interactive dimensions of social systems
(wealth, beauty, power, value and knowledge) and the related five
dimensions of an organization (throughput processes, member-
ship, decision, conflict management, and measurement), the ele-
ments of a throughput system (time, cost flexibility, quality,
measurement, diagnostic, improvement and redesign), the nature
of holistic thinking and iteration, the laws of complexity, loops and
feedback, and more.
All of this was presented as foundational knowledge that
was necessary before we could get to what it was that brought
most of us (or at least me) to this particular workshop—designing
for human interaction. In addition to the number of frameworks
and ideas, and the density of the interconnections among them,
there was a strong normative quality to the material and its presen-
tation. “If one hopes to make any progress at all,” we were told,
“you need to both understand and accept these related ideas.”
This particular version of systems thinking is not unusual in
this respect. Peter Senge’s 1990 edition of The Fifth Discipline
describes one manager’s reaction to a five-day introductory work-
shop on his approach, which among other things, requires growing
comfortable with eight archetypes: “It reminds me of when I first
studied calculus (p. x).” Systems dynamics, the Soft Systems Me-
thod and other approaches face similar concerns.
Each of systems thinking’s various manifestations demands
some degree of subscription to an orthodoxy (a particular view of
just what systems thinking is). And each requires that the user
master a large number of related ideas and techniques, most of
which are not particularly useful on their own.
These requirements are at odds with how we tend to acquire
new knowledge. Rather than accepting a new idea because we
must, we like to try it out. A new skill is most likely to interest us if
it contributes to both short-term and long-term learning objectives.
And the easier it is to try out parts of a theory, the more likely we
are to jump in.

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 The drive to nail “design thinking” down has the same nor-
mative flavor that has restricted the spread of systems thinking.
The urge to create a framework that specifies what and how a
design thinker proceeds seems not just futile but dangerous to the
survival of a movement aimed at expanding the kinds of thinking
that managers, policy makers and citizens engage in.
What is the alternative? I would suggest that we should
focus instead on building and describing an arsenal of methods
and techniques, many of them drawn from various extant design
practices that are applicable to the domains and problems in
question. Describing these techniques as well as the conditions
under which each is of value would constitute an invaluable pro-
gram of research.
You might think of the various pieces of knowledge that we
produce as a component in a kind of intellectual scaffolding that
can be used to support the efforts of others. Rather than having
each flavor of “design thinking” rushing off to build its own com-
prehensive model of what “real design thinkers” do, we might bet-
ter spend our energy on identifying what is useful in what we have
tried or seen done, the conditions under which it seems to break
down, and so on.
In addition to engaging a much larger community in knowl-
edge-sharing, such an approach will provide the users of design
thinking with “trial-size” access to a growing body of knowledge.
One wouldn’t have to buy the whole of “design thinking,” for
example, to accept that there are places in management where
sketching could help out, or that for a large class of problems
spending more time on problem framing and reframing will pay
dividends down the line. In time, each manager will do what
we have learned designers do, adopt those methods, techniques
and ideas that best suit their own personal style and the nature
of the problems that they typically encounter. In the end then,
rather than learning and subscribing to a theory or system of
thought that is based on ideas from design, managers and poli-
cy makers will become designers of a sort particularly suited to
their circumstances.

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