Magical Systems Thinking This is a thing we all know but have a hard time generalising to a new problem.
Le Chatelier’s Principle provided an answer: systems should not be thought of as benign entities that will faithfully carry out their creators’ intentions. Rather, over time, they come to oppose their own proper functioning. Gall elaborated on this idea in his 1975 book Systemantics, named for the universal tendency of systems to display antics. A brief, weird, funny book, Systemantics (The Systems Bible in later editions) is arguably the best field guide to contemporary systems dysfunction. It consists of a series of pithy aphorisms, which the reader is invited to apply to explain the system failures (‘horrible examples’) they witness every day.
I'm pretty sure my printer is malign.
ReplyDeleteLike orcs, they are a corrupted and evil race.
DeleteGood post on systems and systems thinking. See my related post Coupling, which is about what can happen when systems are linked together into higher-level systems:
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General Schriever did a remarkable job with the USAF ballistic missile program. There's a good biography of him which I reviewed here:
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