p.3 At the start of the twentieth century, scientists began to notice that not everything was amenable
to the reductionist approach. Some things, systems, seemed to function and operate only as wholes. They certainly
might have discernible parts, but the parts did not explain the whole.
p.4 To understand any part of these wholes, it was seen as vital to view the part operating in concert with,
and continually adapting to, the other interacting parts making up the whole; a part could not rationally be considered out
of context, excised, sans interactions... This systems approach, as it came to be called, proved highly successful, and it
was widely adopted... So much so, that a new age was declared: the Systems Age.
p.5 Systems may be real, tangible wholes, or they may be concepts. They are comprised of parts, which may
be arranged in some way.
p.6 In a mechanistic world, the idea was to decompose parts to find more basic components, with which to
explain how things worked. Decomposing a goal-seeking system failed to reveal any component as the root of the goal-seeking
behavior. Yet, such purposeful behavior was all around in organisms.
p.7 Cartesian Reductionism could not explain why some wholes possess capabilities, have properties, and
behave in ways that were not evident from examination of their parts in isolation. This observation was labeled "emergence,"
and some wholes were observed to possess or exhibit properties, capabilities and behaviors not exclusively attributable to
any of their rationally separable parts.
p.17 Systems thinking is thinking, scientifically, about phenomena, events, situations, etc., from a systems
perspective, i.e., using systems methods, systems theory and systems tools. Systems thinking, then, looks at wholes, and at
parts of wholes in the context of their respective whole... systems thinking as developed into dynamic modeling of open systems,
often using smart simulation programs
p.18 models are used as experimental laboratories, to explore what might happen in some future situation,
to explore the "what ifs" ... to see if there are likely to be any counterintuitive effects (Forrester, 1971) from unexpected
interactions.
p.19 Cybernetics offers a control view of the world that is neither particularly mechanistic nor oganismic.
The cybernetic model involves some input "signal" which is amplified to drive a mechanism. Information from the mechanism
output is fed back to, and differenced with, the input signal. In this way, the actual output is driven to meet the desired
output as determined by the input signal.
p.21 Whole systems exhibit emergent properties, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
p.91 Systems engineering is the art and science of creating whole solutions to complex problems.
p.194 The aim of [soft systems methodology] stages five and six is to develop courses of action
that are both feasible - i.e., can be started and hopefully carried through... and desirable - i.e., they will bring
about beneficial change... In stage seven, the developed courses of action are put into practice. A single iteration
of SSM is unlikely to solve a problem: it will alter the situation that caused the problem to surface, i.e., action
will simply create a new situation that may benefit from further analysis and intervention using SSM.
p.277 An alternative, innovative approach is to use cumulative selection to explore this vast landscape
of possibilities, in a greatly simplified version of Nature's genetic approach: in effect, to "evolve" a solution system design.
p.371 The question arises, then, is there a relationship between architecture and system behavior,
performance, resilience and vulnerability? Since architecture is delineated by the connections between parts of a
system, clearly the interruption of these connections could prevent interactions, could prevent the parts from operating as
a unified whole and could impair performance. By the same token, if there were multiple connections, such that the severing
of any one did not impair subsystem interactions, then the parts would continue to operate as a unified whole. So,
in principle, redundant linkages coupling parts of a system could make it more resilient.
