Systemantics: How systems work... and especially how they fail

Summary

The primary precept of treatise is that large complex systems are extremely difficult to design correctly despite best intentions and so care must be taken to design smaller less complex systems and to do so with incremental functionality based on close and continual touch with user needs and measures of effectiveness. System failure is an intrinsic feature of systems. The term 'General Systemantics' in deference to the notion of a sweeping theory of system failure and attributed to an intrinsic feature based on laws of system behavior.

Introduction

Dr. Gall, a former medical doctor, wrote a book called General Systemantics  that takes the reader step by step through a series of explanations necessary to an appropriate understanding of 'how systems work... and especially how they fail'. People do not yet understand the basic laws governing the behavior of complex systems and the fundamental rules of their behavior. Follow, above, the principles and all the consequences resulting from systems behavior.

Systems in general work poorly or not at all

This is almost self-evident to those with any experience with the international system, its sub-systems, or with efforts to set up world-wide systems to solve key world problems. Practitioner's would undoubtedly feel more at home with one of his alternative formulations:Nothing complicated works.

 

    New systems generate new problems  

This principle, known to many of us, has never been admitted  organizations. It is always assumed that a new system will eliminate problems. Gall is able to demonstrate that the new situation is in fact much worse than the old because people come to rely on the system's supposed ability to eliminate problems.

 

    Systems operate by redistributing energy into different forms and into accumulations of different sizes

The author was able to deduce from the previous principle that the total problem complex facing the human community is unchanged by organized intervention - the problems merely change their form, their distribution and their relative importance, namely that: The total amount of energy in the universe is fixed. The new term 'energy' is defined as 'any state or condition of the universe, or any portion of it, that requires the expenditure of human effort or ingenuity to bring it into line with human desires, needs, or pleasures'... namely a problem.

 

    Systems tend to grow

Gall suggests that the above principle should be extended to: Systems tend to expand to fill the known universe. Known to them, might be an appropriate qualifier. And indeed one may suspect that many international organizations consider that they have a right to preoccupy themselves with any problem known to them in whatever domain, irrespective of any other organization's actions. This has been remarked with respect to practitioners of disciplines. 'It would be rare indeed if a representative of any one of these disciplines did not feel that his approach to a particular organizational problem would be very fruitful, if not the most fruitful'.

 

    Complex systems exhibit unpredictable behavior and tend to oppose their own proper function

Not only do systems expand well beyond their original goals, but as they evolve they tend to oppose even their own original goals. This is seen as a systems theory analog to chemical and physical processes tend to counteract changed conditions that upset equilibrium until a new equilibrium is established. This same counteraction force can be seen in systems behavior. For example, incentive reward systems set up in business can have the effect of institutionalizing mediocrity.

 

    People in systems do not do what the system says they are doing

It has long been evident to those concerned with the international system that the people in the agencies are not engaged in action to remedy world problems - as the systems would claim - but rather in administrative preoccupations whose relationship to such problems may be remarkably tenuous. As Gall says, 'the larger and more complex the system, the less the resemblance between the true function and the name it bears''.

 

    A function performed by a larger system is not operationally identical to the function of the same name performed by a smaller system

Gall explains this with the problem of obtaining a fresh apple. The larger and more complex the delivery system, the less likely it is that the apple will be as fresh as if picked from the garden by oneself. From which he deduces a point of the utmost importance for international action, and for the new world order, namely that most of the things we human beings desire are non-systems things - but the system has other goals and other people in mind.

 

    The real world is whatever is reported to the system

This is a point which has been explored in depth by Kenneth Boulding in his famous book 'The Image'. Reality becomes the image of reality, however poorly it is represented. There are many examples of this within the international system which has a remarkable capacity for 'discovering' some new principle or truth long after it has been current in the wider society. As Gall remarks: 'to those within a system, the outside reality tends to pale and disappear'. This weakness is reinforced, perhaps deliberately, by the system's complex reporting procedure - which is often so cumbersome that it is always able to claim plaintively 'we were not informed', in cases when it did not want to be informed. Gall describes a significant breakthrough by which the 'amount of reality' reaching an administrative officer can be indicated with precision.

 

    Systems attract systems people

 Systems isolate those who work within them by a)feeding them a distorted and partial version of the external world, and b)giving them the illusion of power and effectiveness, they also attract people with attributes for success within the system irrespective of the problems with which it is supposedly concerned, or who are able to live parasitically at the expense of the system.

 

    A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works

Big systems built from scratch almost never work. You have to start from scratch with a working simple system and grow it carefully. This might not work, either, but it's your only hope.

 

    In complex systems, malfunction and even total non-function may not be detectable for long periods, if ever.

Major international programs have operated for decades before being proved a complete failure. On a much smaller scale there is the delightful story of the office tucked away in a major agency which for many years prepared periodic issues of a 'current bibliography' with regular budgetary approval. No provision had ever been made, however, for the publication and distribution of the successive issues prepared and no one was aware of the work done, or made any use of it.

 

    A complex system can fail in an infinite number of ways

Those who recognize the possibility of failure cannot hope to design effectively' against it as has been shown time and again. It might almost be said that such systems generate new methods of failure and educate people into increasing acceptance of them. In fact the international system may be characterised by the contrast between the extraordinarily high expectations of those who do not know its limitations and the extraordinarily low expectations of those who do.

 

    Escalating the wrong solution will not improve the outcome.

What actually happens is that the multiplication of systems  massively increases the amount of communication required to achieve the desired goal. The more systems that have to function together, the more time they spend trying to communicate rather than actually working the problem.

 

    Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.

Gall points out: 'Systems can do many things, but one thing they emphatically cannot do is to solve problems. This is because problem-solving is not a systems-function and there is no satisfactory systems-approximation to the solution of a problem. A system represents someone's solution to a problem. The system does not solve the problem. Yet, whenever a particular problem is large enough and puzzling enough to be considered a capital 'P Problem, men rush in to solve it by means of a System'. The international problem-solving institutions, existing or proposed, cannot be taken seriously until the implications of this point are examined.

 

Conclusions

Mechanical systems tend either to work reasonably well or else not at all. But human systems, because their outputs are subject to perception and interpretation, may actually continue to exist even though they have long since ceased to perform the function for which they were created.
So anything said about the bizarre behavior of systems in general goes double for systems that rely in human behavior or motivations.


References:

http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm

http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs/systfail.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics