Levels of Systems: Better Outcomes for Big Challenges
By Carol Sanford Originally published at Wharton School, International Conference on Systems Thinking and Management 1992,
As a manager in DuPont who finally came face to face with the Freon nightmare, I can tell you that thinking too small about a system gets you into more trouble, instead of getting you out. To “get out”, we had to change ourselves as people and how we thought about what system we were working on. Only then did we realize we had to provide leadership to the whole (blankity blank) World if we were to really solve the problem. It was not enough to work from a living systems model of how we, and all of life, are connected. Even more difficult was facing the fact that we had to build a “better mind” to “think with” among our own leadership to really grasp the challenge and to overcome the fear that came up every time we saw what was really needed. If we had not moved to more complex thinking processes and development of ourselves, we would either still be fighting regulations or maybe just gotten ourselves out of the problem production—leaving the problems to others. But definitely we would not have considered working with global infrastructure, including governments on the cusp of developing the same product and making the problem worse. Instead we, the global we, created a whole new set of products. And we made more money, felt more ethical and got a whole lot smarter about tackling challenges at this level of complexity. This included forgetting, “keep it simple stupid”. Maybe it should be, “ keep it essential stupid”. VP of Intermediate Chemicals
Why a New Typology of Systems?
A typology, as commonly used, seeks to organize our world into buckets. On occasion some writers have organized segmented types into pathological hierarchies where some types are discounted in the face of more favored types. The typology offered here is not only seeking to creating an ordering (rather than an organizing into buckets) hierarchy, where different capacity and capabilities of complexity can be understood, and used in interactive and practical ways, but to demonstrate the necessity of all when seen as a whole and the essence of each system is understood. The hierarchy adds two levels beyond the levels presented in most discussion on system thinking, each subsuming the previous one as they progress. These two additional levels embody richness and value in themselves as well as bestow it to all types— bringing completeness and thereby more potential to management practices. The intention is to provide hope and vision to the field.
Premises:
q There is a growing understanding among management that in order to be sustainably effective, they are required to understand systems thinking and practices. But the present organizing models for systems are insufficient to lead to workable practices at very complex levels or to achieve the full potential that systems thinking experts claim it offers.
q A hierarchy of systems types that is nested, rather than one that trivializes lower levels, can explain a dynamic real world, where each type is needed at different levels of complexity. Additionally the hierarchy offers design guidelines for managing change based on a system technology for application, inclusively, of all types. The typology provides the framework for applying the type of system thinking to the appropriate scale of effortand the means of organizing design processes to leverage the power that is in the hierarchy.
q The hierarchy of systems thinking typology has a practical application in a designing or planning process by providing a sequence of systems thinking by type that leverages the best and most sustainable outcomes. The typology is a framework for moving from the larger context and “mind field” that is necessary for managing complexity down through application to manifesting the best or most sustainable solution for the greatest number of wholes.
q Systems improvement ideas can be assessed and validated by the hierarchy providing the base for an actually shift in fundamental outcomes rather than simply changes to an existing way of working or output of work. The idea of improvement itself connotes that some plateau or plane is better than others and that we can rise to higher strata overtime. A framework for understanding such improvement plateaus provides a roadmap for such a venture. Further managers can assess whether new techniques that are offered by the popular press and the latest guru are up to the task they have, what level of complexity the techniques really tackle or whether they are systems-based processes at all.
q Manager’s can provide a framework for the workforce to shift their level of motivation in carrying out a change process, since the typology is isomorphic with reality rather than segmented into chucks that can be managed. The typical outcome of change efforts is either employees work mechanically on tasks or become frustrated when they run into illogical gaps in practice with how the world works. A more whole approach, as offered here, raises the level of potential involvement and the level of commitment by organizational members.
The typology offered here has been developed by a collaboration of practitioners working in business and human development efforts for over four decades with a backdrop of systems science as our guide. The typology is drawn partly from already existing typologies in related fields including physical and biological sciences and the study of consciousness and mental processes. Five types or levels of systems and the systems attributes associated with them differentiate the typology of systems concepts. The names given to the levels are closed, cybernetic, complex adaptive, developmental, and evolutionary. The emphasis of this paper will be on how the types are differentiated from one another as well as how they complement. It will also challenge some currently held views, practices, and understanding of existing typologies using closed, open and living systems as an ordering approach. We also do not believe it is the last word on the subject and value the continued building of this work.
The Practice: A Case Study Summarized
Kingsford Charcoal, a division of Clorox, created a system problem when it improved productivity so significantly that it meant that almost half its production facilities were no longer needed. Initially the thinking was done primarily from a closed system view—the effect on the company alone considered— and it was assumed that layoffs and plant closings would follow a routine course of action, leading to enormous savings for the company. They did get great savings, but it followed anything but a typical closed systems model of thinking and acting.
Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking:
Kingsford had an active change process underway that had led to the improved productivity. Focused on productivity, it had not yet considered the impact of actions from a living system view where a multitude of entities might be considered to have a stake in the outcomes of actions taken. Suppliers were assumed to be expendable, workers would sadly have to find new jobs (but that could not be helped), and the shutdown of the production process had not taken the environment or the community into account. When a manager in the process introduced a complex adaptive system process, this led to setting up a team to look at the problems and what needed to be done in each case. The teams were quick to grasp the impact of the companies’ actions, especially in the small towns where jobs were scarce. But they lost steam quickly when it was not clear how the company could do much except give good severance packages so the people had a decent amount of time to find work. The team also worked with local retraining and placement groups, ultimately boldly proposing that the company offer a very generous departure package. They created a plan to give suppliers long lead times relative to their closings to ensure the supplier could transition their business to new customers. The closure teams were feeling better about themselves, but still felt like more needed doing but it was outside the realm of their accountability or seeming ability to effect.
Development Systems thinking:
There were several things missing that needed a development view of systems to resolve the problems. Luckily the senior management of the organization had just stepped up to the plate to take a very different look at how you sustain change and how it would demand a greater scope of thinking as well as greater involvement than most companies are willing to take on. First the idea that they actually had to have a “mind” or thinking capability that was able to conceive of different ideas confronted them. You could not “brainstorm” your way into solving these problems, because the existing way of thinking was still employed in the brainstorming task and the same level of capability was being used. They had to learn to see how their own thinking and way of thinking was getting in their way before they could take on more complex systems. It became clear quickly where the idea of ‘keep it simple stupid’ had come in. If you cannot think about something that is complex, break in down to what you can think about with your current thinking skill, even if it is indivisible in the way it works in real life. But for these teams, thinking about complexity, how the world really is, opened the door to rethinking the business. Two different processes entered at this level:
1. Developing capability to see themselves and how they work individually and as groups or teams.Successful athletes are generally coached to see his or her own thinking and responses to actions around him or her. They learn to self-manage their responses behaviorally and their thinking reflectively. The Kingsford leadership team worked to build the capability to exercise this same type of conscious mental energy. They learned to do it by developing their capacity to see what was actually structuring their thinking—usually some long held, but outdated ideas about how markets and people really work reified by the frames of reference they had long held. The team discovered they had to use different systems frameworks to guide them to be more systemic in thinking.
2. The second element was how to see the heart or essence of their businesses and what it took to grow a business in value toward that essence (also the essence of each person in the organization). For Kingsford the essence was “creating the ultimate backyard BBQ experience”. This way of viewing systems enabled the leadership to generated new product systems ideas that including many quickly implementable products, like quick lighting briquettes that did not exist at the time. And working to develop products from the essence of the business provided a great deal of room and capability stretch toward some new and exciting products as they could develop new technologies and as the market evolved to be valuing new solutions.
The managers now realized they would need some of the people targeted for lay off to build the new products. Unfortunately many of them were too unskilled. And they certainly did not need them all. For the level of change needed, the team feared they would have to take on the local government and education systems and maybe the federal government’s unemployment rules to really solve it. This realization initially produced a sense of overwhelm. They had moved a lot closer because they were developing their business from its core and they were also actually improving the value of the business to most of its stakeholders by new offerings providing better margins, earnings and professional growth opportunities. And their ability to think about more difficult challenges had wetted their appetites to try to resolve the challenge.
Evolutionary Systems thinking:
Their initial anger and frustration with the governmental and educational infrastructure was quickly checked when the intention to create a true evolution become the commitment. Lobbying, a more cybernetic model of working, was initially tried, falling short, as most readers here would suspect. They had to return to a different level of thinking again. What actually happened, and is fundamental to evolutionary systems thinking, is the whole they called a system was redefined. It was now a whole of which they were a part and in which each action of the elements of the whole were creating “it” by their collective actions. It was no longer possible to see the infrastructure as “the other” which had to be confronted. They were “it”. Or more precisely, the “us and them” disappeared. The question became what are the supra-ordinate aim and the supra-ordinate managing principles that will evolve “the whole”. Now teams had to include the community education system and workforce planning entities among other agencies. It became apparent that creative principles were needed to drive the thinking to a new level and hold it there.
First principle the Evolutionary Core Team established was:
“Every person leaving does so only when they have an equal or higher level job in income and ability to contribute”. This called for some radical development of people. Many had worked at Kingsford for so long, it was not apparent that they were illiterate. These long-time workers knew the systems so well and since they were very intelligent, had learned to fool themselves as well as others for years. Since the second principle was, “people who left the company would upgrade the overall workforce level of the community and any new employer they joined bringing ‘state of the art’ skills and abilities”, the demand for this closing was very different than typical closings. On-site education was put in place in all sites inviting in family members as well. Children learned along side their fathers, and wives with husbands. This extended to all facilities, not just those closing. The class participants produced a newsletter about the company and the community. The rate of learning and change was so great that in Kentucky the Governor gave Kingsford the award for Outstanding Community Contribution, and cited their unorthodox involvement of community leaders and government administrators as a core source of success. The commitment to truly ensuring something worked for the Greater Whole, not just the company, ensured they did not raise the unemployment rate nor turn low skilled workers into a community putting higher pressure on the social service system. They raised the overall community even in closing facilities. The Chairman of Clorox’s board could not believe the number of letters from ‘those who left the company” and level of passion they felt for the company values and the respect with which it had treated them. The same was true of letters from leaders in government, education, and social services.
Evolutionary systems thinking practices also led Kingsford managers, over time, to understanding that new ideas came more often from something they “read” almost between the lines that was already moving toward coming into existence. It was just “blocked” from view for most in the industry by their way of planning and thinking. They realized the companies or organizations that could shift their way of searching to one that had more receptive and reflective thinking would find what worked for the whole. And the organization who could go to the place the answer was already moving toward would also be the most profitable. They often felt more like mystics than managers. Although it produced magic in the organization, it really it was only a different way of thinking—evolutionary, not anything magical.
Complex Adaptive Systems: Viewed from an Evolutionary Level of Systems Thinking
If an organization has in place the evolutionary and developmental systems thinking, they come to Complex adaptive systems with a different understanding. Where before the limit was “how to think about the impact on other stakeholders”, now the question became “how to set of reciprocal maintaining processes between themselves and other stakeholders that keep the dynamics in the forefront and not waiting until a problem is apparent”. People had developed greater ableness to think about greater connections and not to fall prey to their fears or sink into competitive responses that lowered the effect on the entire system. This view becomes one of a value-adding process where you are always looking up and down stream for ways to change. The Kingsford production employees now began to see, with the new mind and way of looking, places where environmental impacts could be eliminated in their products, ones that saved money for the company and made a better product for the customer. For example, where they were drying out charcoal with lots of heat, one employee began to see that the water put in further up stream could be reduced and lowered the heating bill, and the use of water from near by dams making the briquettes easier to light for the customer resulting in less pollution. The teams set up cybernetic feedback loops on their machinery to start getting more information on use of other materials. Donella Meadows (1997) helped us see that information offered from one level, if put into a shifted paradigm, can have a huge impact on creativity and will to change. With cybernetic information held in the context of evolutionary system, you understand the best leverage for the whole. Several closed systems were designed in the making of charcoal where product distillation was better managed with less and less lost energy and waste that also led to further product improvements as well as effluent reduction.
All levels of systems were used in redesigning the company, its products and in developing the producers. But if the work had started with closed system or with the cybernetic model, too much would have been missed because the connection to supra-ordinate aims and new managing processes and principles limited where the mind could go and the discovery could be focused.
The Theory—with Business Examples
Typing or Classification of the Systems
When individuals first attempt to understand or to see anything from a systems point of view, it is for most, somewhat difficult. Our upbringing and particularly our education have trained our thought patterns to follow a segmented and reductionist path. As a result we have spent most of our lives seeing the world around us in a non-dynamic and segmented way. We have to actually build new capabilities to be able to see the world from a systems perspective. Once we have seen it through ‘systems eyes’, it is much like the Gestalt pictures of the old and young woman (or the vase and two profiles facing one another). When you know how to see them both, you understand how they were both always there. The new capability to see systems starts with being able to “envision” relationships and structural components of a whole. The classification we are working with here is one of seeing the topologies of relationships and structures.
The differentiation between types of systems is based on four dynamic elements. The first is the inherent or attributed objective of the system type. By this I mean that a system has a role to serve by its existence. The five categories of objectives are stabilization, operating, maintaining relationship or effectiveness, improving, and regeneration. (Krone:1985-2003)
The second classifying element is the quality mental energy that the managers must use to achieve the objective at each level. This topology of energies comes from the work of John G. Bennett (1964), the English Mathematician and philosopher, in his monumental work to describe the systematics of the Universe and all its relationships. The five qualities of energy are vital, automatic, sensitive, conscious (awareness of our awareness and ability to manage our thinking), and creative.
The third classifying element of systems might be the basis of change or transformation, or that which initiates or fuels change at each level of system type. The five classifications of change or transformation used are mechanisms (i.e. functional moving parts of machinery), feedback or information, natural principles or laws, essence or harmonizing, and supra-ordinate aims of a whole. These attributes are draw from work done by Charles Krone. (C. Krone.:1985-2003)
The fourth element that distinguishes between the five levels if the degree of ordering or disorder sought or required. The lowest ordering is entropic, or it is in a state of disordering and become more and more random, as with closed systems. The cybernetic and complex adaptive system, tend to seek homeostasis, or the ability to return to a steady state but also can engage heterostatically with disruption without loss of existence. Interpretations are drawn from the work of David Bohm (1980) and Erich Jantsch (1980). Evolutionary and Developmental systems have not only an ability and need to have homeostasis in some arenas, but an innate drive and calling toward a state of recurring and expanding heterostasis. Bateson (1979) called this process one of seeking a difference that makes a difference or is meaningful to the whole.
HIERARCHY OF SYSTEMS Thinking
Closed Systems These systems are labeled closed because they are identified with mechanical objects and machinery that have limited access and ability to exchange energy with systems outside of their boundaries. (Wiener: 1950) They are subject to wearing out or running down because of an inability to import or exchange energy in any integral or permanent way. Even though a closed system, like a machine, may have a sense of permanence, it has no ability to import energy so that it may organize itself to rebuild or replace deterioration. It is fully subject to the second to the second law of thermodynamics, i.e. entropy.
Since, according to Bertalanffy(1968), it is not possible for a closed system to go beyond its initial conditions, the system’s primary “objective” is to work to reduce entropy or increase Stabilization since it is paramount for its survival. In industry, operators in a production operation are very aware of this nature of objective for their production line. They must keep product within certain tolerances and standards or the product has reduced or maybe no value for the customer. This is why mechanisms are built and maintained to ensure this stable outcome. Examples of mechanisms include the electronic or mechanical testing equipment that monitors the chemical or physical components of the material as it is being transformed at each stage.
The energy used here is what Bennett (1964) refers to as Vital, or life giving energy. The material production system itself, uses materials that are taken from the earth and transformed, hopeful for a higher value.. If you have ever spent any time in a production facility, you can experience the life giving quality (or the lack of it) and the important role the material and the response of people plays in working with closed systems. The machines can have no life of their own, so human energy is used to feed the closed systems, continuously and repeated with the life giving materials and energy of people and from the various mechanisms that can be borrowed or invented.
Cybernetics Systems The term cybernetics was introduced originally to present understanding of the phenomena of systems and it fact has become synonymous for many people with the term “systems”. Much of the development in the Cybernetic Systems Field is a phenomenon of the computer revolution based on modeling, replicating, or simulating human activity, particularly the brain. The systems theory came was a by-product of attempts to build computers that can replicate brains functions. Much of this work was done and made available by N. Wiener (1950, 1980), G. Bateson (1979), and the Cybernetics group (Heims: 1991), .at the Macy conferences that began in 1946.
Study of Cybernetic Systems is the study of the theory of messages or information. Weiner points out that all information is subject to disorganization in transit resulting from nature’s tendency to degrade the organization and destroy the meaningful. (1950). The objective of cybernetic systems is to continue to function or operate in the environment as a result of or in spite of the interactions it has with its environment. The operational feature of a cybernetic system therefore is primarily a responsive or control one based on feedback received from the environment. A thermostat is seeking to control the temperature in a room based on feedback from the sensors. A person, who seeks to establish an automatic maintenance system without constant effort on the part of any person to adjust the temperature, establishes the set point. This regulatory process is the means used to achieve homeostasis and avoid rundown of the system. In business settings this can be seen in the use of customer feedback or in employee surveys to determine the climate in a unit, especially when this are made a routine and regular part of the business activity. Here, the ordering that is sought, is prevention of loss of customers and to ensure a steady state in employee morale.
Complex adaptive These systems are systems that exchange energy in a symbiotic relationship with the environment with an effort to ensure homeostasis. The work of Bertalanffy (1968), Laszlo (1972,1991), and J. Miller (1978) and other biologist provides a clear picture of this systems type often called General Systems Theory and later Open Systems. There is in practice today a close link between cybernetics and complex adaptive because much of the systems concepts developed in the 60’s and 70’s drew on cybernetics in its move toward open systems, particularly human systems. (Bateson: 1979).
For practical as well as value reasons it is important to separate these types of systems. Much of the popular cybernetics systems work is being drawn from mechanical and computer research and applied inappropriately to human systems. It is not surprising that this has arisen given the metaphor of the last 300 years of “man as machine” paradigm that holds such strong sway in this century. Complex adaptive systems or open systems are ones that exchange energy and can change and adapt based on responding to the exchange with the environment that is not possible with cybernetic systems. In fact frequently the term Living Systems is applied to arenas that are more accurately called complex adaptive open systems. It banalizes the term Living Systems to use the thinking processes of complex adaptive systems.
The objective of complex adaptive systems is to create and maintain a reciprocal maintenance relationship with other stakeholders in the context in which they exist. Since they are exchanging energies, they affect one another even without intentionality to do so. At the global business level this can be seen in businesses working to build relationships with local governments and to adapt to regional and local preferences. Being sensitive to changes in the relationship is the way most energy is expended. The heterostatic mode is activated when the system determines that laws or principles it considers to be fundamental or inviolable are being challenged.
Developmental Systems These systems are ones that through the introduction of consciousness (seeing and self-managing our own way of thinking and acting with a purpose as a guide) enable people to transform themselves into being something different— a self that is of service to the present and future benefit of others. Another possible term for this level is purposeful system. The term developmental includes spiritual forms of systems but is not limited to spiritual. Because of the segmentation in our current mentation as a means of processing phenomena, it is difficult without practice to see developmental system ideas and ways of working. Developmental, in the frameworks of Charles Krone (1984-2003), means particularly uncovering the full potential and expression of the unique essence of any entities or systems. This uncovering can occur in a classroom or a factory as well as a spiritual setting. There is work among scientist on this type of system (Bohm:1980, Hofstadter & Dennett: 1981), including published work in the great spiritual traditions around the world. (Govinda: 1976). In business systems developmental thinking manifest as a reconceptualization of the values of the business by explore its core values, core process and core purpose.
A developmental approach is based on a paradigm that sees all living entities (e.g. humans, organizations, nations) as having a unique essence or being, that is searching for the channels and means of expression, but often becomes mechanical in its working, without any awareness of this mechanical thinking and behavior. A business would ask itself what is at its core based on several points of reference and the drivers for those choices. It values finding the essence of individuals and a place for them to contribute to the business’ singular direction. Managers come to see people as open-ended in terms of moving toward essence being expressed. It is rare because it actually takes a process to development people beyond their current mind and being—and thereby to do the same for the company or organization. Some individuals and companies can put themselves into this process without outside threats and create a developmental process. But most companies, even when they face the “gut wrenching” experience of competitive pressures, seek to operate only as a cybernetic or at best a complex adaptive system—just raising the level of reactivity or adaptivity.
Once an organization finds the essence of its business it works to improve its means of production and focus on improving everything and every person to achieve that essence. Working developmentally requires a different ontology—one that sees the system as having conscious purpose in the context of other higher purposes and working to retain consciousness of these purposes as a means developing the systems and its way of working. It seeks to align its essence and that of all people with those purposes and the new level of reciprocal maintenance. The organization works to ensure conscientiousness in regard to these purposes and develop people to use conscious mental energy. People across the organization become aware of their own mental faculties and how to guide their own thinking with intentionality, which is actually quite rare in spite of our beliefs about ourselves as people. Without the addition of development processes a company remains, at best, a complex adaptive system working primarily to adapt or change its relationships with these infrastructures, in order to maintain homeostasis.
Evolutionary Systems:
Evolutionary system organizations focusing on engaging, at a fundamental level, the infrastructure of which they are apart in order to change their own working and increase their contribution to the whole. As Donella Meadows told friends in private correspondence, “(we need to) see how trapped we are by the very systems we create (the market, democratic government, corporations). It leads us logically and ineluctably to see that our crazy, unsustainable, soul-demeaning systems evolve from our world views, our paradigms, our deepest story about our being and our purpose.”(Meadows: 1999) Meadows also lamented the fact that her existing knowledge of systems thinking, as an expert in her field, was too limited and left out these core elements. That is true of the popular systems literature. Evolutionary Systems thinking sees it as core and provides a process for valuing it and building capability to include it in the design process.
Evolutionary Systems look closely at operating infrastructures which hold our functioning in a particularly way, such as roadways determine where we can travel. The existence of gas stations continues to foster building of gasoline, not electric, automobiles. The travel infrastructure has no place, at this moment, to plug in electric cars on a cross-country trip. Any organization can move itself to thinking as an evolutionary system by moving from working on the relationship between itself and its connected or parallel systems, to taking on or joining with supra-ordinate aim of greater systems or the operating infrastructure systems of which it is a part while developing people and the organization from essence. The organization must work regeneratively to accomplish this, which means it seeks to improve the process, the producer, and the product simultaneously. An example of this might be an Amish farm, which seeks to improve the output of its farm, the quality of the output, but simultaneously to improve the soil by improving the means of growing and farming generally. Where as developmental systems will seek to improve based on their own essential nature, the evolutionary system understands it can only improve itself long term by improving the entire infrastructure and to do so in a way that is consistent with what is evolutionary for the larger systems of which it is apart. In a business setting, the business is looking at the entire value-chain and the context of its industry and what it serves. This may lead it to moving away from working on just the agricultural industry, to working on the processes of “eating” as a system, and feel stewardship for the entire value chain from seed development to the nutrient quality of produce and its effect on health, just as DuPont Agriculture did in looking at the world from this level of system framework. The organization then returns to designing the development process, complex adaptive reciprocal processes, the cybernetic systems where feedback is needed in the operations, and builds a closed system to process what had been called waste, safely, into a recycled state of value.
Summary:
It is important to understand from the beginning that this typology is not segmented, as the reductionist use of our mind would invite us to see them. There is a nested relationship between all levels where the higher ordering systems types include the capacities of the less complex ordering of types. It is helpful to avoid the picture of these as parallel but different, and instead to visualize them as concentric rings. Any one entity may have several levels of systems operating within it and may even use many overlapping elements at work. For example the human body has many systems that are working to ensure homeostasis in the body, some systems can regenerate parts of the body (e.g. skin) and recent research indicated that cells may also have the ability to reorder or shift their structure and response based on magnetic fields similar to a cybernetic model. With consciousness introduced, new levels of systems come into play and can even then affect the normal living systems functions of the respiratory or circulatory systems in the body. The evolutionary and developmental systems generally come into play under special circumstances, the developmental system with the development of capability to manage one’s consciousness, and the evolutionary system with building the mind that can understand and value a larger systems disruption or disordering as an opportunity to pursue regeneration.
Nested Relationships: Systems Levels to the 5th Power
Each of these types sets in a nested or enfolded relationship with the previous and next type. Let us take the example of a business that is faced with a new product introduced by a competitor; one that is a replacement for their product, and is cheaper and more desired. A system operating only from conceptualizing itself, although unconsciously and without a construct for doing so, as a cybernetic system may drop its own prices and try to hang onto some market share assuming feedback has been given. An organization that has a concept that is coincident with complex adaptive might work on the relationship with the customer and work to adjust their own product to best meet the customer demands and then move into the new product line through acquisitions or product development work. The cybernetic system functioning is also present in the complex adaptive concept, but the perspective of the complex adaptive concept enables a heterostatic based understanding and direction setting in utilizing the information and feedback presented to it. Each new level of system adds some new perspective and therefore some utility to the previous level of system.
In a developmental systems concept, it asks whether the changes that are occurring are consistent with its own essence and therefore its core mission. If it is not or cannot be seen to impact it negatively in its markets, it knows to avoid putting energy that might derail it. Most likely the organization would probably have their own substitute product on the drawing boards already and one that would be more compatible with all other systems and their need for expressing the essence of that products intended effect. They are aware of how their products compare to upcoming offerings, but are more aware of the changing possibilities for their customers and how to improve their customer’s success. The feedback loops are present, from cybernetics models, but they are highly interactive and not separated out as a mode of information gathering. They are reforming from their own internal reading of patterns before they arise.
A system operating with a concept of itself as an evolutionary system would have been working with governmental infrastructures or industry organizations to create appropriate innovations. Again they would have access to the lower ordering concepts from complex adaptive, cybernetic, and developmental systems thereby maintaining sensitivity to the changing world and dynamics coming in, as well as the feedback that guides the specific activities set in motion as part of evolving to a new state of doing business. It certainly would not have been surprised by the introduction of substitute products because it had access to the information coming in through these lower ordering systems. A company would be seeking regenerative processes and would probably be the company making the introduction or would find the introduction rejuvenating to the industry and would be seeking to understand the valuing changes that were happening in the marketplace in order to be a better contributor in the restructuring that is going on in the industry. The company would more likely be playing a key role in the restructuring of the industry when it sees that opportunity to bring it more in line with the values that are emerging in the world around it. By working from a conceptualization of all four levels of systems it may even have co-created a partnership in a joint venture with customers or competitors from early groundwork.
Again it would be bringing the disordering, dissipative structures, from the evolutionary process, and working from principles and environmental sensing processes of lower systems, in this level of systems. The concepts from lower systems would be interpreted differently however as a result of the higher ordering perspective of developmental concepts.
Hopefully, the typology offers ways to consider the limits that we place on objectives that can be achieved and in some cases are being achieved outside of our awareness. It is an attempt to place systems concepts under the same microscope that the use of systems, as a concept, has enabled us to use in scrutinizing other phenomena. This gives us more options, fewer limitations, and better understanding of our own work, as we inquire, articulate, and seek to guide change.
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