What do you mean by a systems approach ?
Last spring, I was talking with Ronda Hernandez, who was one of the Vice Principals at Davis High School, and is now the Director of Curriculum, Instructional Technology and Support Services for the Yolo County Office of Education. With a background as a mathematics teacher, one of her areas of responsibility for the Davis School District was the science curriculum for grades 7 through 12 in the district. Another was the school-to-career program, which she proudly champions.
Ms. Hernandez was describing how the school-to-career program should be looked at with a broader point of view: it is the whole package, the relevant classes, the internship placement, and career counseling, and more, all together. She said it requires looking from a systems approach.
What do you mean ?
You know, a systems approach. (Like everyone knows what it means.)
No. I have been studying general systems theory for thirty years, ever since I graduated from college. It is my religion. It means so many different things to me that I want to understand what it means to you….
So I asked her if I had ever told her about my favorite book. When she said no, we met and I showed her some of my systems books.
So, what are we really talking about here ?
A system interacts with its environment dynamically. So what’s the big deal. Well, the feats of engineering that are the underpinning of Twentieth Century western technological modernity too often assumed no external consequences. What traditional economists discount as neighborhood effects, like pollution, stress, discrimination, waste dumping, violence, war, and uncertainty about the future of the planet. The purpose of the systems approach is to bring all of the variables into the picture.
The future is in systems thinking. We can no longer look at technical systems in isolation, but must see a potential technology as nested in social and biological systems.
Basically, it means shifting from a world view that is based in physics to one that is based in biological interactions. It means thinking about the world as dynamic, fluid, and evolving, rather than complete and static, the way that has only one truth.
Now, Davis has more biological scientists per capita than just about anywhere else, so as you can imagine, there are lots of levels of systems analysis happening in average daily Davis conversations.
The last class I ever took in biology was back in high school, but I have had several pre-Vet and plant science roommates (haven’t we all), so most of my biological education has been by osmosis.
SCIENCE IN TRANSITION
In 1956, noted British scientist C.P. Snow wrote a book about science becoming disconnected with its societal consequences (“Two Cultures: Literature and Science”). It shook post-World War II Western academia at its vain complacent roots, every bit as much as the Russian Sputnik did in 1957.
In response, deep in the bowels of academia, the systems approach was formally invented in 1954 as “applied general systems theory”. Its parents included:
James Miller, a psychiatrist who after World War II was responsible for the Harvard program to interview all of the returning prisoners of war. He coined the phrase behavioral science. Miller was later the President of the University of Louisville.
Kenneth Boulding, an economist who organized a discussion series on cooperation and competition in 1953 at the University of Michigan which brought together the key systems designers. He wrote a short paper in 1954 called “Systems as the Skeleton of Science”. His Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964) was my introduction to systems.
But it was the three decades of writing of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, a Dutch organistic biologist, that laid the foundation for this new language and philosophy that emphasizes synthesis, integration, and comprehensivity, in addition to the more traditional analysis, individuation, and specificity. Von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (1968) is a compilation of his definitive systems work in: philosophy, biology, physics, physical chemistry, sociology, and psychiatry.
Systems as a language is not so much a fabrication as an acknowledgement of how the world works. Teilhard de Chardin, in The Phenomenon of Man (1954), says the problem is complexification, and the answer is sophistication. Systems is a language for analyzing modern problems, and then finding directions for societal improvement.
Here are a couple examples from the popular culture:
Economics: W. Edwards Deming was the American efficiency expert who the Japanese national association of scientists and engineers hired in 1951 to transform the Japanese economy. Deming is the only American who has influenced Japan more than Douglas MacArthur (who designed the Japanese constitution). Deming brought the Japanese economy into its modern success using the systems approach to bust out old stereotypes. Systems is the most prominent chapter in his book, The New Economics: for Industry, Government and Education (1994).
Psychology: Gregory Bateson, in Mind and Nature (1979), debates the role of consciousness, wrestling with the tension between the individual, society and the larger culture. As Margaret Mead’s husband during their early productive years, Bateson is known for his papers published as Steps to an Ecology of the Mind (1972).
Second generation systems scientists also include UCD’s Ken Watt, a zoologist who is controversial for his many alternative explanations for popular myths, like what causes AIDs; my teacher at CSU-Sacramento, metamodeler John Van Gigch, and Stafford Beer, lately of Toronto.
(Oh, Jon’s friends groan, here comes his favorite book….) Beer’s Platform for Change (1974) is fifteen statements he developed in the early 1970s to explain that our models of the world are too simplistic to work in the future because they are static. Most are speeches, to people in health care, law enforcement, UNESCO, operations research, and the Science Committee of the House of the U.S. Congress (management at the very top, Stafford says), plus an article in Management Today, and a BBC radio address (which was so critical of establishment media that it was censored). Between the speeches are a narrative, a metalanguage and a thesis.
The problem is that Platform for Change didn’t have a table of contents, so I made one up. It got to Stafford. When Wiley and Sons of Chichester reprinted Platform for Change, he asked me to write a reader’s guide, so I have the last eight pages in my favorite book. The table of contents is now on page 463.
So what does this have to do with Davis ? In 1975, while I was working in the state legislature, I developed many ideas about using computer information flow to more easily manage the economy and our social institutions. The manipulation of data is the easy part; the hard part is to think through how a local economy like Davis’ can be vital and viable.
That is the version of biotechnology I think about every day.
Jon can be reached at jli@yolo.com.
