Mastery of any transdiscipline starts with studying the conceptual minimum. The concept of a “system” is in its basis. An actor thinks about the world of objects and things in “systems”. Here we can draw an analogy with physics that introduces a concept of “physical body,” which means a material object having its mass, shape and volume.
Further, all the reasoning and laws of physics are related to a physical body; and when the laws of physics are applied in practice, a “physical body” is changed for a relevant material object, like a road, a chair, a rocket or an engine piston. The analogy is the same with the concept of a “system”.
Every actor works with personal systems. One person has a house as a system, or a computer program, or a trained artificial intelligence; another has a child, prepared for adult life; and the third has a grown tree or a grove. Each person creates systems consciously or unconsciously. A systems actor does it consciously.
In specific projects, attention of a person or a team singles out “systems” out of the physical world. Systems thinking is an ability to single out systems, describe and create them, and also perform certain actions with them.
A person cannot comprehend the world as a whole because the computational capacity of the brain is insufficient for this. A person, by attention, singles out the important things out of the reality, but at the same time tries not to lose the connection of these important things with the world, i.e., does not lose context. The concept of a “system” lets us manage attention; this is why they say that systems thinking is an ability to manage attention.
Three important classic properties of a “system” are integrity, emergence and nesting.
- Integrity means that a system has a boundary, and the interconnection between its parts is stronger than with other objects of physical reality. This property helps to single out systems by one’s attention. There are no issues with boundaries in simple objects like a table or a car; however, it is difficult to locate boundaries when considering complex systems. It is not easy to understand what a water safety system, or a pass issue system, or heating system is. We will discuss complex systems in more detail later.
- Emergence is the second important property of a system. In English, “emerge” means to appear. That is, emergence means that a system gets a new property (function), which no separate part of it had before. For example, an engine, a frame and a passenger compartment are assembled into a car system, which gets a new function - movement with a passenger. No part of a car has this function. It appeared after all subsystems were assembled together. Any system has property of emergence; and if it does not have a function, it is not a system.
- The third property of classical systems is nesting. Nesting can be presented as a matryoshka – a nesting doll, when one system is put into another, which is a supra system for it. A nesting property suggests that any system is a supra system for a subsystem, and also is a part of a bigger supra system. If we say that we have a system, it automatically has a subsystem and a supra system.
All three above-mentioned properties of a classic system help to single out relevant objects out of the physical world, keep attention on a system and analyze its structure (subsystems) if necessary, and maintain connection with the physical world (a supra system).
Let us look at a “chronometer” system. Firstly, it can be visualized in the physical world. Any chronometer has integrity and boundaries. It has the emergence property, that is, it has the function of showing time. However, this function appears only after all parts of a chronometer are assembled, but its separate parts do not have this function. Nesting manifests itself in the fact that every part of a chronometer is a part of the whole system. And the face of a chronometer also has its subsystems.