Think of an automobile engine.
How do you know how it works? Well, you could take it apart and look at a few of its pieces.
But that doesn’t tell you much about what an engine does. You have to look at the context – the system – that the engine is a part of.
The engine is necessary for the automobile to run, but it is not enough. The system that is the engine can only be understood and defined as part of a larger system. Many of its properties depend on interactions with other systems.
If you are faced with an unknown system, most of us have been taught to take it apart, determine the purpose of the individual parts, and then bring that knowledge back together to understand whole. But this method, called analysis, wouldn’t have told you that the engine was part of a car, or perhaps something else.
Anaysis can’t tell you why the engine is of a certain horsepower and shape or give you the purpose behind its functioning. Explanations and answers to “why” lie outside the system and in the systems around it.
If you approached that unknown system via the synthesis method you would have first identified what was around it, then described the behavior of the containing whole, then separated out your understanding of the whole to understand the function of the parts.
Most of the time we need to move back and forth between the two methods for complete understanding.
These ideas, among others, were presented by Dr. Russell Ackoff, a noted systems theorist, in a talk that he gave at Huntingdon Beach, CA in 2003 which was posted on YouTube. The original is a little quiet at first, so you may want ear phones, but be prepared for an increase in volume a few minutes in.
There is also a Part 1 that focuses on the change in thinking required over time and a Part 3 that focuses on how architecture is a systems thinking discipline.
Images credit: dave_7
