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Systems Thinking and the Emergence of a Comprehensive Science of Human Behavior

Charles M. White
LCSW, CADC Social Work Ph.D. Student - Rutgers University

Peter Senge, Director of the Systems Thinking and Organizational Learning Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management, recounts a tragic story in his much celebrated organizational management book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. I think the story provides a rather poignant illustration of just how important it can be for individuals, and for society as a whole, to be able to utilize systems thinking – at the very least in situations where linear "reactions" seem to promote dreadful outcomes:

"Some years ago . . . while on an early spring canoe trip in Maine . . . We had come to a small dam, and put in to shore to portage around the obstacle. A second group arrived, and a young man who had been drinking decided to take his rubber raft over the dam. When the raft overturned after going over the dam, he was dumped into the freezing water. Unable to reach him, we watched in horror as he struggled desperately to swim downstream against the backwash at the base of the dam. His struggle lasted only a few minutes; then he died of hypothermia. Immediately, his limp body was sucked down into the swirling water. Seconds later, it popped up, ten yards downstream, free of the maelstrom at the base of the dam. What he had tried in vain to achieve in the last moments of his life, the currents accomplished for him within seconds after his death. Ironically, it was his very struggle against the forces at the base of the dam that killed him. He didn't know that the only way out was "counterintuitive". If he hadn't tried to keep his head above water, but instead dived down to where the current flowed downstream, he would have survived . . . This tragic story illustrates the essence of the systems perspective . . . Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Conversely, learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them." (Senge, 1990, 93-94)

Part I: A Few Niches for "Systems Thinking" in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

The biochemist Lawrence Henderson was one of the first in recent centuries to use the word "system" as a descriptive term for both living organisms and social systems. Henderson defined a "system" as: "an integrated whole whose essential properties arise from the relationships between its parts." And "systems thinking" became defined as: "the understanding of a phenomenon within the context of a larger whole." This latter definition is, in fact, the root meaning of the word "system," derived from the Greek synhistanai - that is "to place together". Therefore, to understand things systemically, literally means "to put them into a context, to establish the nature of their relationships" (Capra, 1996, 27).

Imprecise representations and approximations of systems thinking are pervasive in modern English. Terms such as: "interdependence", "mutual influence", and "feedback; and phrases such as: "checks and balances" - introduced in the United States Constitution, "interplay of thesis and antithesis" – the essence of the dialectic of Marx and Hegel, "self-fulfilling prophecy" – the idea that originally unfounded fears elicit behaviors that facilitate the realization of the feared outcome, "vicious circle or cycle" – a condition where undesirable situations are continually worsened through perpetual sequences of self-reinforcing events, and the "bandwagon effect" – the phenomenon where movements tend to gain additional supporters merely by having a growing number of supporters; are all rudimentary attempts to utilize systems thinking to make sense of the phenomena of everyday life. However, these terms and phrases tend to be too circumscribed and/or superficial to adequately capture the breadth and subtleties of systemic interactions, or to sustain the panoramic observation strategy necessary to comprehend the functioning of a particular system (Capra, 1996, 62-63 & Papero, 1990, 15).

There has been an increase in the number, range, and diversity of systems thinking applications over the last forty years. Systems thinking has been utilized in such diverse fields as the physical and natural sciences, engineering, economics, medicine, sociology, psychology, and management. It has been applied on individual, family, group, community, regional, national, and global organizational levels, and to a wide range of physiological, social, political, corporate, economic, and ecological phenomena (Senge, 1990, 68-69).

Peter Senge, believes that the complexities of modern life necessitate the promotion and advancement of systems thinking in the general population. Senge contends that the "data saturation" that accompanies the "information age" has fostered an ever-increasing interdependency between people. One result of this is that the pace of expected adaptation is accelerated to a pace that exceeds individuals' abilities to accommodate. According to Senge, for the first time in history, humans have the capacity to create far more information than anyone can possibly absorb.

Being on the receiving end of a data deluge serves to undermine peoples' confidence and sense of personal responsibility. The frustration associated with this predicament is often expressed in comments such as: "It's all too complex for me," or "There's nothing I can do. It's the system." Senge believes that systems thinking can serve as the antidote to the sense of helplessness that many people feel as the world enters the "age of interdependency." He writes: "Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the 'structures' that underlie complex situations, and for discerning . . . how to foster health. To do so, systems thinking offers a language that begins by restructuring how we think" (Senge, 1990, 69).

Dr. Michael Kerr, Director of the Georgetown Family Center, believes that systems thinking will significantly influence the future course of medicine. According to Kerr, systems thinking will foster the dissolution of the present compartmentalization of medicine, and will serve as the foundation for an integrative theory of health. He contends that while particular
subspecialties in medicine will remain, a comprehensive systems theory of physical and emotional functioning and behavior has the potential to diminish the compartmentalization and myopic "symptom focus" in medicine. As physicians, guided by systems theory, begin to view the symptom(s) "within the larger context of the individual, and to view the individual within the larger context of his important relationship systems, it will make symptoms more manageable for those who have them" (Kerr, 1997b, 210).

Systems thinker Ed Friedman, was known for his astute observations about the pervasiveness of medicine's monocular focus on symptoms and pathology. One of his more celebrated illustrations involved the questions on the standard patient information form that individuals receive on their first visit to a physician's office. He remarked that "There is not one question designed to tell the doctor one's capacity for recuperation!" Friedman utilized systems thinking to draft a preliminary, and slightly tongue-in-cheek, addendum for the standard patient information form (Friedman, 1992, 11). He included questions such as:

• How long do you think it's going to take for you to get over this?
• Who will suffer most from your demise?
• Who will benefit most from your demise?
• What relational binds are you now experiencing that might inhibit your body from responding naturally to health promoting procedures?
• What factors may be compromising your own integrity in such a way that you are more likely to have complications after surgery, side-effects from drugs or an auto-immune response?

Friedman believed that the primary benefit of these questions resided in the thinking, re-orientation towards "self", and the immunological integrity provoked, stimulated, and/or awakened in readers as they attempted to answer the questions. The information acquired through answering the questions was secondary. Friedman held that even a slight increase in the patient's immunological integrity, stamina, resiliency, and/or maturity "response" could significantly diminish the intensity or severity of individual and family symptom(s), crisis, anxiety, and/or environmental toxicity (Friedman, 1991, 143-144, & 1992, 16-17).

Systems thinking can be thought of as a dynamic discipline where its practitioners continually engage in a process of "seeing wholes" — a perspective that pays close attention to the interrelationships and patterns of influence between things, rather than attending only to the things themselves or to static "snapshots" of phenomena (Senge, 1990, 68). During the first half of the twentieth century, "organismic" biologists utilized systems thinking to imprecisely describe and define some of the patterns of influence between components of organisms or living systems (Bonner, 1969, 26-27). In the early 1920's, the philosopher C. D. Broad coined the term "emergent properties" to describe and define this set of systemic processes. Broad defined emergent properties as: operational rules or patterns that appear at a specific level of systemic complexity but do not exist at lower levels (Capra, 1996, 28-29). A specific property is only called an "emergent property" at the level of systemic or organizational complexity at which the property first appears. An "emergent" property will not be evident in any of the dissected parts of the complex organism or living system. To the organismic biologists, emergent properties arise from the interactions and relationships among the organism's parts.

The rationale for understanding emergent properties is: if a person can identify, understand, and assimilate the universal attribute(s) of systemic functioning that emerge at the most basic level of life - bacterial or cellular, then this universal attribute(s) can be identified and understood at the next level of systemic sophistication - multi-cellular organisms — even as new universal attribute(s) emerge at this more complex level of organization. The upwardly spiraling process of "identifying » understanding » assimilating" emergent properties is repeated up the phylogenetic scale and provides the foundation for understanding the social species — including human social systems. Fritjof Capra, the Director of the Center for Ecoliteracy at Berkeley, describes this spiraling process as "systems nesting within other systems"; and adds that another key criterion of systems thinking is being able to shift one's attention back and forth between levels of systemic complexity (Capra, 1996, 37).

The first strategic benefit to the person, who makes an extended effort to understand emergent properties up the phylogenetic scale, is the acquired ability to rapidly understand the organismal functioning of very complex systems — an understanding that will be impossible to achieve utilizing a reductionist approach starting from the highest level of systemic organization (Bonner, 1969, 26). Second, the systems thinker will be able to simultaneously avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity of these systems, and buried in the volumes of data that are continually excreted out of the "information orifices" of such systems. Lastly, by first acquiring an overall understanding of the organismal functioning of very complex systems, the systems thinker will be able to engage in "informed" reductionism — concentrating his or her resource-intensive reductionistic efforts towards targeted problems that became definable only after comprehending the functioning of complex systems on the organismal level (Bonner, 1969, 27).

I’ll begin this section with a quote by John Bonner, professor emeritus in evolutionary biology at Princeton University and Princeton Family Center faculty member:

"Science is about things . . . There are two ways we can deal with these things. The first and most obvious one is to describe them . . . But description in itself is dissatisfying and insufficient. It is a large heap with no order to it. Finding the order in the descriptive facts is the great purpose of science. The making of generalizations — sometimes called theories, or laws, or principles — about facts is always considered the greatest triumph in the human pursuit of science. These generalizations vary greatly in their character. Sometimes they are a simple classification of the facts. This serves to give some order to the heap, so that Nature appears to have a system." (Bonner, 1969, 22).

In the physical sciences, systems thinking has been utilized for centuries as a vehicle for providing order to constellations of facts, and for recognizing emergent patterns in natural phenomena. The resolution of the multi-thousand year old debate over the "nature of light" provides an excellent historical example of how systems thinking helped to facilitate the unification of physical optics theory and provided a foundation for a new, and legitimate, scientific field of study. In addition to sparing the listeners one more re-telling of the often over-referenced Copernican saga, the story of the unification of physical optics also presents a "multiple school" situation — not unlike that of psychiatry and it's allied disciplines at the end of the twentieth century.

Before the end of the seventeenth century, there was no generally accepted theory about the nature of light. Instead, there were a number of competing schools and sub-schools — most of them peddling some variation of Epicurean, Aristotelian, or Platonic theory. And each school was fueled by the particular brand of metaphysics that accompanied its respective theory. Each school tended to emphasize a particular cluster of optical phenomena that its own theory could do the most to explain. Incompatible observations were dealt with perfunctorily or remained as outstanding problems for further research. It is important to note that each school periodically made significant contributions to the field's literature through supplying useful concepts and techniques; and that Newton drew from this literature while fashioning the first uniformly accepted theory of physical optics.

Science historians surveying the domain of physical optics prior to Newton would probably conclude that, although the field's practitioners were "scientists", the product of these scientists' research was something other than science. Prior to Newton, no concepts or body of belief could be taken for granted — each physical optics researcher felt continual pressure to laboriously construct his theory base from its foundations whenever he sought to document his research. The advantage to this was that each researcher could select his own constellation of supporting observations and experiment in relative freedom — there were no methodological standards or phenomena that every optical researcher felt compelled to employ and explain.

These researchers eventually produced books that paid as much attention to proselytizing members of the competing schools as was paid to nature. The former agenda disappeared once Newton utilized systems thinking to synthesize his unified theory of physical optics. Newton was able to see emergent properties and patterns in the whole optical phenomenon — properties that were previously undetected to the various school researchers whose capacities to observe may have been compromised by their metaphysical commitments. With Newton's unified optical theory, researchers could finally put aside partisanship and wholly devote themselves to a legitimate and unencumbered observation of nature (Kuhn, 1962, 12-13).

While there may be some similarities between the history of physical optics theory and a contemporary assessment of psychiatry, the latter has yet to reach the stage where theoretical unification appears eminent. According to science historian Thomas Kuhn, biology will be the next discipline to acquire its first universally accepted comprehensive theory. At the end of the twentieth century, only segments of biology - such as the study of heredity via Mendel's laws, have obtained unified theories. Kuhn questioned whether any parts of the social and/or behavioral "sciences" have acquired uniformly accepted theories. He often reminded his readers that the journey to the acquisition of a consensually embraced unified theory is an extraordinarily rigorous expedition (Kuhn, 1962, 15). However, Kuhn also reminded his readers that, while a unified theory must prove itself to be better than its competitors, it need not - and, in fact, never does - provide explanations for all the observations from nature with which it could possibly pertain (Kuhn, 1962, 17).

In order for there to be movement in psychiatry towards acquiring a first universally sanctioned comprehensive theory, researchers must decide whether they think the attainment of an impersonal and unbiased theory about human behavior is even possible. Dr. Michael Kerr believes that it is possible to attain an impersonal theory of human behavior, and points to the success of the physical sciences in utilizing facts about the physical world for developing an impersonal theory that took humans to the moon and back. Kerr contends that "Subjectivity had dominated human thinking about the solar system for centuries, but eventually a theory devoid of subjectivity successfully guided our technology into space" (Kerr, 1997a, 90). However, in response to his own question of whether it is "possible to observe facts of functioning about human behavior and use them as the basis of a scientific theory", Kerr acknowledges that "At this point in our knowledge, neither a 'yes' or 'no' answer to this question can be proven or disproven . . . " (Kerr, 1997a, 90). Whether natural systems thinking/theory could be the synthesizing force for moving psychiatry forward toward an answer to this question and toward a unified theory remains itself an unanswered question. There is a strong precedence in the history of science of systems thinking being utilized as a catalyst to promote forward movement in emerging sciences.

References

 Bonner, J. T. (1969). The scale of nature. New York: Harper and Row.

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems.
New York: Anchor Books.

Friedman, E. H. (1991). Bowen theory and therapy. In A. S. Gurman & D. P. Kniskern (Eds.), Handbook of family therapy: Vol. 2. (pp. 134-170). New York: Brunner/Mazel.

Friedman, E. H. (1992, October). The challenge of change and the spirit of adventure. Paper presented at the 50th anniversary celebration of the American Association
for Marriage and Family Therapy, Miami Beach, FL.

Kerr, M. E. (1997a). Challenging assumptions. In R. R. Sagar (Ed.), Bowen theory and practice. (pp. 85-90). Washington: Georgetown Family Center.

Kerr, M. E. (1997b). Primary care medicine and the family. In R. R. Sagar (Ed.), Bowen theory and practice. (pp. 199-210). Washington: Georgetown Family Center.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed. enlarged). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Papero, D. V. (1990). Bowen family systems theory. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency.