00361 Systems Thinking and Permaculture

Systems thinking is the process of understanding how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems thinking examples include ecosystems in which various elements such as air, water, movement, plants, and animals work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures, and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy. — Wikipedia

A forest is a self-organizing and self-regulating system. If it works, it works. If it stops working as a forest, it evolves into something else, like a grassland savannah or an arid desert.

Systems thinkers study the individual characteristics of parts and their relationships to other parts of the system or structure. Indeed, the relationships of the parts are a primary direction of study and inquiry.

Problems can only be understood and resolved by considering them in relation to the whole system which they disturb. The individual parts of a system — and the links that unite discrete parts into a whole system — are critical to finding resolutions for perceived problems.

The difficulty of this should not be discounted.

As people come to these concepts, we generally approach a problem by first making detailed studies of its various “parts.” After this we study the way those parts relate to each other. Finally, we consider how they operate as a “whole.”

Systems thinking helps us understand the problem of unintended consequences.

We do something over here — and later we find that it has a pronounced negative effect some place else, maybe something we hadn’t even considered.

A recent example of this is the regime change the Western nations sponsored in Libya. This resulted in an invasion of Mali by soldiers who previously worked for Gadhafi. They linked up with Al Qaida and as of the publication of this book, they run the northern part of Mali where they have imposed a harsh interpretation of Sharia law and persecute Christians.

Because of this well known problem of unintended consequences, systems design promotes communication among all levels, links, and elements of an organization or system. This helps avoid the problem of information sinks, where important information disappears and is not available to the rest of the system.

Since good decisions require good data, imperfect or missing data can contribute to less-than-optimal decisions and to catastrophes of all kinds and magnitudes

One characteristic information sink is known as the “information silo.”

On a farm, a silo is a tall building, that stores grain. In an information silo system, news and data move up and down vertical channels, where managers serve as gatekeepers with the power to restrict or enhance the flow of information. The walls of the information channels limit lateral communication. If a manager makes a mistake, and withholds certain data, problems may proliferate throughout the organization. A system locked in an information silo simply can’t communicate with other systems or components.

Solving Problems.

The problem contains the solution. This is true because a larger whole contains the problem and the problem is thus an integral part of the whole. It is a tree in the forest. To find the best resolution, we look at the larger system. All too often, however, people just look for symptomatic relief and don’t worry about the larger issues. This creates more problems down the line as the problem continues to grow since no one ever gets to the heart of the matter.

Permaculture problem solving involves designing holistic systems that work. The permaculture ethics of caring for people, caring for the planet, and having a care for the future guide our design work. .

Wikipedia on Systems

Science systems thinkers consider that:

—a system is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit;

— energy, material and information flow among the different
elements that compose the system;

—a system is a community situated within an environment;

— energy, material and information flow from and to the
surrounding environment via semipermeable membranes or boundaries;

—systems are often composed of entities seeking equilibrium but can exhibit oscillating, chaotic, or exponential behavior.

Systems thinking incorporates:

—Holistic thinking. It’s not really possible to adequately describe an object by only an examination of its constituent parts. Parts are important, as are the links and relationships that unite the discrete parts into a whole whatever. In other words, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

— Feedback. Some system of regulation must exist for the system to
maintain itself and accomplish its purposes. Feedback can be reinforcing or it can be correcting. Too much of something will initiate an ecological response. So will too little of something or a sudden degradation of a system.

—Imports and Exports. A closed system has no external imports and does not export to its environment. An open system has additional imports and also exports to its environment.

— Entropy. Always present and active.

—Complexity. Smaller subsystems build up to larger complex systems.

— Specialization. There is often a differentiation of functions
within the system, where subsystems are responsible for certain activities/tasks that benefit themselves and the whole system.

—Interdependence. Systems and the objects and systems that compose them, relate to and depend upon each other.

— Teleology. The systems interactions move it toward a goal.

—Transformation. Imports become exports in fulfillment of the teleological purpose.

— Stacked functions. Getting more than one kind of result from the
same activities and resources.

—Redundancy. Uses multiple ways to achieve important results/functions.

(End Wikipedia quote.)

Physicist Fritjof Capra on whole systems thinking —

I shall identify five criteria of systems approach...

  1. Shift from the parts to the whole. The properties of the parts can be understood only from the dynamics of the whole. In fact, ultimately there are no parts at all.
  2. Shift from the structure to the process. In the new paradigm, every structure is seen as a manifestation of an underlying process.
  3. Shift from objective to epistemic science. In the new paradigm, it is believed the epistemology — the understanding of the process of knowledge — has to be included explicitly in the description of natural phenomenon...
  4. A shift from building to networks as a metaphor of knowledge. In the new paradigm, the metaphor of knowledge as a building is being replaced by that of the network.
  5. Shift from truth to approximate descriptions. This insight is crucial to all modern science...in the new paradigm, it is recognized that all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate...