Subject: System Objective

Posted by Jay W. Forrester on 9/27/2006
In Reply To:System Objective Posted by Michael Cleghorn on 9/26/2006

Message:

Michael Cleghorn wrote:
>In your closing comment, you said "the favored policies cause
>increasing difficulty and the greater difficulty provides more
>incentive for doing the very things that are causing trouble". Is this
>incentive a psychological rat race we often find ourselves caught up in
>or is it referring to a systems process that I'm still learning about?


I believe we are dealing here with a fundamental nature of systems and how they interact with people. A person's intuition and judgement are conditioned by experiences with simple systems. Simple systems are the only ones that we clearly understand. Unfortunately, the lessons learned from simple systems are contrary to the behavior of complex systems and those inappropriate lessons lead people in the wrong direction when faced with the complexity of almost all of the important systems in our lives.

As one of several classes of misleading teachings of simple systems we learn that cause and effect are closely related in time and in space. If one touches a hot stove, the pain is now and the location is here; cause and effect are obvious and close together in both time and space. But this lesson is wrong in more complex systems. In larger real-life systems, the cause of a symptom may be far back in time and may come from an entirely different part of the system.
However, to make matters more misleading, the complex system will present what appears to be a cause that is close in time and space, but that apparent cause in only a coincident symptom of the real cause. People are then led to deal with what they see as the apparent cause rather than finding the true cause.

To suggest, without being sure because I have done no modeling in this area, examine the national preoccupation with low standards of performance in our K-12 schools, especially in mathematics and writing. The solution appears to be more pressure on teaching the material. But is the teaching the cause, or is the material the cause. Several writers have commented on how the problem in education arises from the students being bored, but without followup to determine why it is boring and how to eliminate boredom. Does one solve the problem with more pressure to learn what is boring, or is the challenge to have an education process that is exciting and relevant and which students want to penetrate deeply?

In addition to the above matter of causes shifting from immediate in time and space for simple systems to being remote in both time and space for complex systems, there are several other kinds of ways that systems mislead people. Maybe we can get to them later. You will find some of them in Chapter 6 of my "Urban Dynamics" book and in the talk, "Learning through System Dynamics as Preparation for the 21st Century," that I gave to the K-12 conference in 1994 and is available from the Creative Learning Exchange web site.


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Jay W. Forrester
Professor of Management
Sloan School
Massachusetts Institute of Technology