p.1 This is a book about the people who shaped an idea - that to make sense of the complexity of
the world, we need to look at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting it down into its parts and looking
at each in isolation. In this book we call that idea systems thinking... Our focus in the book is on people and how
their personalities, lives and links with each other shaped these ideas.
p.2 Our goal in the book is to describe a set of thinkers [30] whose work has been profoundly influential,
and who collectively shaped the field of systems thinking.
p.21 Wiener's definition of cybernetics contains two important paired concepts. He was clear that
control (in physiological and engineering terms) and communication were highly related phenomena, and could be expressed in
terms of feedback.
p.21 In the 1930s and early 1940s, Wiener had conducted two major research projects - with Arturo Rosenbleuth
on feedback within human and animal physiology; and with Julian Bigelow on the building of control systems for anti-aircraft
weaponry (during World War II), again based on feedback principles. Rosenbleuth et al. (1943) put these projects together
with the statement that "all purposeful behaviour may be considered to require negative feedback"
p.151 His frustration with OR [Operations Research] led Ackoff, as it did Churchman, in the direction
of systems thinking (particularly general systems theory). He argued that we have left the machine age,
with its concept of the universe as a mechanism and its consequent focus on analytical thinking and reductionism; and
instead are entering the systems age, with a focus on synthetic (systemic) thinking and expansionism, the idea "that
all objects, events, and experiences of them are parts of larger wholes" (Ackoff 1974, p. 12).
