antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 7:14 pm on September 21, 2022

Apart from the ‘blind men and the elephant’, and the ‘steersman/kybernetes’ what are some archetypal illustrations of systems thinking | complexity | cybernetics?

I like eg ‘Eppur si muove’ https://bit.ly/3BLbBw7 and

‘the evening star IS the morning star’ https://bit.ly/3qGh2Gc

In this LinkedIn post, I also commented ‘Obviously I should have used ‘flocking’ and ‘that obesity map’ too :-)’

John Siegrist said ‘Does the butterfly effect count? I believe Lorentz used to talk about chaos in weather forecasting? And of course there’s the Tulip Bulb Mania.’

Steve Whitla pointed out ‘

The Watt centrifugal governor – exemplifies how in a well-designed system going out of control is also the means of bringing itself back into control. I’ve used this quite a bit since I saw Stafford Beer draw one on a whiteboard to make the point … thermostats are a commoner example but they’re static – watching little globes spinning wildly round and round is more visceral. He added – watch from 35:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg‘
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What else? Boids, Game of Life?

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antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:33 pm on February 27, 2023

This prompt finally made it to the Systems Sciences group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2391509563/posts/10160153493594564/

Lots of good replies from Gerald Midgley:

I have two slides with cartoons I use at the end of some talks. One is the usual blind men and the elephant (which many audiences with English as a second language don’t know, by the way). The other is another blind men cartoon, but this time they are feeling a bunch of miscellaneous items, and they are all saying “it’s an elephant”. I use that to illustrate systems thinking challenging groupthink.

Bateson’s question about whether giraffes grew long necks to eat high-up leaves, or whether trees grew taller so their leaves evaded the mouths of giraffes! Of course, it’s both in interaction.

In Buddhist cultures, the idea that cause and effect are mediated by context. So, a seed falling into soil will grow into a tree, but the same seed falling on a stone path will not do so.

A question asked by the lecturer in the very first Systems 101 talk I attended… Is a bicycle a system? A lot of students answered ‘yes’, but the lecturer said ‘no, because there is no emergent property from a bike without a rider – it is adding a rider that makes it a system, and the emergent property is moving from A to B’. Of course, then students started asking “what about the road? There would be no movement without ground to ride on”, and “what about the air that the rider needs to breath?” Of course the lecturer then got into no system representation being comprehensive, but instead it needs to be adequate for a purpose.

Bathtub dynamics is used by a lot of system dynamics practitioners to illustrate a system.