|
Systemic Thinking is a process of making sense
of complex and diverse Corporate knowledge about the client's market,
manufacturing and external environment through enabling all staff to see
their role, their teams responsibilities and the organisation's strategic
imperatives as interdependent.
|
|
SYSTEMS CHARACTERISTICS
Purpose: A system can only be conceived when there is a clear articulation
of an organisational purpose. That is some relationship has to be articulated
that allows the issue to be discriminated from the environment. The purpose
usually expresses the dimensions of the relationship between the system
and its environment.
Boundaries: As soon as a purpose has been expressed the boundaries
of the system can be identified. In this process the aspects of the environment
that are encompassed in the system are articulated. The process of boundary
identification also shows what parts of the environment are marginal to
the system. That is just included or just excluded. Boundary judgements
are an important characteristic of Systemic Thinking.
Coherence: All the dynamics that exist within a system need to
have a coherence (a sense of wholeness) if they are to be a legitimate
part of that system. A test for coherence is often conducted to assist
boundary judgements.
Emergence: A characteristic of systems is that the whole has characteristics
that can not be identified from a study of the systems parts. The characteristics
that arise from wholeness are termed emergent characteristics. Searching
for emergent characteristics in complex systems is an important area of
Systemic Thinking.
Hierarchy: Every issue that is looked at systemically can be understood
as having three levels of activity, that is a three level hierarchy—supra-system,
system and sub-system. The ability to hold these three levels of hierarchy
in your mind at the same time while considering an issue and appreciating
the way in which changes at one level affect changes at the other levels
is known as systemic thinking.
Sub-systems: These are the parts of the system that have to interact
in an interdependent way for the system to achieve a balance and express
its purpose on the supra-system. The parts are also the only way a system
can learn about its environment, they are the power-house that give life
to the system.
Environment: This is a term often given to the supra-system and
encompasses all things not included in the system by its purpose. Obviously
there will be some aspects of the environment, which have a close relationship
with the system while other dimensions will seem to be totally unrelated.
However, in Systemic Thinking all aspects have some relationship to the
system although it may be very tenuous and the pathway of the relationship
almost impossible to discover.
The key idea here is that systems are whole entities with properties that
are different from those of the sums of their (interconnected) parts.
|
