The Logical Thinking Process. Chapter 1

"The System’s Goal

Let’s look at systems from a broader perspective. Why do systems exist? In the most basic sense the answer is, “To achieve a goal.” If the system’s purpose is to achieve a goal, who gets to decide what the goal should be?...In human organizational systems the goal setter ought to be the system’s owner--or owners. If you or I paid for the system, we’d expect to be the one to decide what the system’s goal should be."

I suggest that these propositions should be understood in the reverse order of that which they are presented.

Organizational systems are owned by those who paid for them. (Later we will see that this plays a role in the need to define systems as integral wholes...the owners own the systems and therefore all the parts of the system). This is exactly the nature of the argument that all property is owned by those who “paid for it” that has led to the ever increasing destruction of the earth’s natural resources by their “owners”. It also neglects the dependence of all “systems” on an ecology of other systems that they are symbiotic with. 

Following on ownership we have the concept of the “goal”. This construction reminds me forcibly of the theological arguments about the “goal” of human life (and the argument that human life should be understood in terms of a deity who, having “paid” for the creation then “owns” the creatures). All systems manifest tendencies, which can be intentionally strengthened or diminished, but the argument that the system has a “purpose” that is the purpose of its “owner” is a logical precursor to the argument that the owner’s “goal” should be the system’s priority. 

The vast and ongoing literature on management testifies to the huge difficulty experienced in try to constrain a system to reach a defined “goal”. Either systems themselves are by nature hugely disfunctional, or something else is going on. Our everyday experience of organizational systems would be better explained by the hypothesis that such systems are (like the human body) made up of a collection of symbiotic systems that work together (or more less successfully) but that also can be defined as having their own, independent “goals”. Keeping them all in a successful balance (as anyone who has struggled with cancer, weight loss or diabetes can testify) is an endless, ongoing struggle. 

If a system is not fully “owned” by its owners it makes more sense that they cannot, in practice, fully determine its direction (which puts aside the question of whether the owners goals are actually beneficial to the system they own)