Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
organization are fully sufficient to create the difficulty, regardless
of what happens outside the company or in the marketplace.”
—Jay W. Forrester,
Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems, Technology Review,
73(3), 52-68, 1971
That is, before one starts looking for external reasons for failure
or external sources for problems, look inside. There may be enough
that is wrong to cause the problematic outcome.
Going Beyond the Analytical Approach
Charles West Churchman was an American philosopher in the field of
management science, operations research, and systems theory. His think-
ing about the systems approach can best be summarized in his words:
“The ultimate meaning of the systems approach, therefore, lies
in the creation of a theory of deception and in a fuller under-
standing of the ways in which the human being can be deceived
about his world and in an interaction between these different
viewpoints.”
Thus, according to Churchman, the best way to approach a system is to
look through someone else's eyes. The world is ever-expanding, so no
single view can be “complete.” In fact, Churchman scoffs at the arrogance
of the narrator of the “four blind men describing an elephant” story in
believing that partial views are useless, by saying that it is not necessary
for every wise man to always get on top of the situation.
A designer should view a system “top down,” but build it “bottom
up,” staying conscious of the environment (human nature, morality, pol-
itics, and aesthetics), and the organizational and technical aspects that
surround it. Most world systems are open systems. Due to the interactions
of the components, the overall impact can be very different from the
effects of the individual components. An open environment is character-
ized by continuous exchange of matter, energy, and information.
One of the fundamental postulates of the systems approach is that the
problems of most organizations (and organisms for that matter) are essen-
tially stochastic in nature. This is different from the deterministic system
view of many management scientists, where chaos is not an accepted
phenomenon. As such, analysis and design approaches to systems should
incorporate internal flexibility to accommodate changes in the environment.
