The History of Systems Thinking

Sadly, the history of systems thinking begins with a Nazi named Ludwig von Bertalanffy. No matter how history tells his story, he was not a good human being. However, his impact is far-reaching. Bertalanffy is one of the principal authors of the school of thought known as general systems theory and systems science. His contribution to the intellectual history of the twentieth century is substantial. Bertalanffy's main interest as a biologist was curing cancer. Besides biology, his contributions span cybernetics, education, history, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. He was in the U.S. when Nazi Germany annexed Austria on March 12, 1938. Despite his many attempts to remain in the U.S., he returned to Vienna in October. He joined the Nazi party and immediately adopted the Nazi ideology.

Bertalanffy's ideas tackled the difference between conventional science and the new ideas of a systems science. Conventional science, not system science, is based on studying parts through reductionism. Reductionists believe that humans are explained by breaking down their behavior into smaller components. The whole is explained by its parts. Over the last 400 years, conventional science has proven to be an incredibly successful social technology, as exemplified by Newton and his successors. A reductionist examines factors and establishes causal links. Einstein's Theory of Relativity, for example, describes how changes in one thing affect another mathematically. According to conventional science, if all natural laws were known, the world could be fully understood and predictable. According to system science, this is not true. The study of systems is based on the principle that the whole is greater than the parts.

Bertalanffy created the concept of systems science. In the 1930s, Bertalanffy pioneered the General System Theory (GST). The Society for General Systems Research (GSR), the ISSS, was founded by Bertalanffy. Bertalanffy's GSR was established in 1954 to reach a scientific unity for all complex organisms on Earth. Bertalanffy's GST brought order to a chaotic world.

In his idea, Bertalanffy aimed to address or contradict the idea that all things in the world result from accidents or random processes, and the world has no order; it is a chaotic place. According to him, Social Darwinism and behaviorism are the results of that kind of theory. Social Darwinism argues that individuals fail because of their weaknesses. Behaviorism says behavior is learned from interacting with the environment. According to conventional science, individuals can only respond to random environmental fluctuations. However, GST holds that the world is organized. GST thus sees the world as possessing inherent organizational properties. As a result, GST gives rise to Cybernetics, Information Theory, General Systems Theory, Game Theory, Decision Making, Queueing Theory, and Operational Research.

Bertalanffy's GSR Society had three prominent members: Marget Mead, Russell Ackoff, and Ross Ashby. Mead is known for her research on sex in traditional cultures of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, which influenced the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Her argument was for a widening of sexual conventions in western culture.

Russell Ackoff was a pioneer in management science and systems thinking. Peter Drucker was his close friend. Drucker's work, in general, owes much to Ackoff's early contributions to management. Ackoff and Deming worked together at the Bureau of the Census. Ackoff was said to be the only one who called Dr. Deming Ed. Deming called Ackoff, "hey boy." Bertalanffy probably met Deming while he was in the United States. The lectures Bertalanffy gave were often the subject of academic discussion. Ackoff probably introduced him to Bertalanffy. Dr. Deming attended a seminar with Bertalanffy. Deming's "Appreciation of System" as part of his System of Profound Knowledge was likely inspired by this.

In the 1960s, British cyberneticist and psychologist Ross Ashby proposed a law for levels of regulation and variety in biological systems.

"When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial), the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy the system - Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety"

Ashby's Law says that we should deal effectively with the problems we face in the world. Responses must be as nuanced as the problems they are supposed to solve. Ashby is not as well known as Herbert Simon and Norbert Wiener, two other distinguished scientists he influenced. The work of Bernalanffy also inspired Aldous Huxley, who wrote "Brave New World," and Abraham Maslow, who developed Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological well-being based on satisfying human needs in order of priority, culminating in self-actualization.

August 13, 1940, will forever be associated with the Second World War. For the Germans, this marked the date of the Battle of Britain. More than 1500 German aircraft attacked British air stations and aircraft factories. Over a thousand Londoners were killed by bombs in the following two weeks, and September was even worse. Throughout ten hours, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire were attacked. There were 1,485 sorties (missions) flown by the Luftwaffe. In his view, General Goring could annihilate Britain's air force in one day, paving the way for a ground invasion. The offensive was codenamed Operation Adlerangriff, or 'Eagle Attack.' If the Royal Airforce could not defend the skies over the English Channel then their airfields would be destroyed. In this way, the Luftwaffe would prevent the Royal Navy from contesting the landings of the German army. Ludwig von Bertalanffy and the Nazis did not succeed in their plans. General Goring's plan was a failure.

It goes like this: every movie you have ever seen about planes on bombing missions in World War II is wrong. The Germans had already overrun continental Europe by 1940. Britain stands alone. One of the untold stories of World War II is that it was the first electronic war. The first electronic war began with World War II. By 1940, the Germans had conquered continental Europe. The United Kingdom and Germany are playing a cat-and-mouse game of air-to-ground radar. The British, hoping to improve relations with the United States, proposed exchanging secret technical information in July 1940. At this point, the United States lags behind Germany and Great Britain in radar research and development. The British Technical and Scientific Mission, better known as the Tizard Mission after its leader, Henry Tizard, brought the resonant cavity magnetron to the United States in September 1940. The resonant cavity magnetron was a small device capable of generating high-power, centimeter-wavelength pulses of radio waves or microwaves. The story goes that one of the scientists had a chocolate bar in their pocket and noticed it was meted by the cavity magnetron. This results in the creation of the microwave. Due to the increased power and shorter wavelengths, the cavity magnetron increased detection range, accuracy, and resolution, while its small size allowed it to be installed on aircraft and smaller ships. At Bell Laboratories, cavity magnetrons were immediately recognized as valuable and put into production.

After World War I, Vannevar Bush was frustrated by the US not applying scientific knowledge to military problems. Bush developed a government agency of civilian scientists to serve military needs and explore new technologies. He presented his ideas on a single page on June 12, 1940, to President Roosevelt, who promptly approved their implementation. Due to the creation of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), science played an important role in the development of American military technology. American scientists had previously focused on evaluating inventions for the military; with the establishment of the NDRC, the focus was shifted to conducting large-scale research projects to meet military needs and blurred the line between scientific research and engineering development. Raytheon Company was also founded by Vannevar Bush. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology established the Radiation Laboratory, or Rad Lab after a committee recommended it. Rad Lab produced 150 radar systems during World War II for a variety of missions, including airborne interception radars for night fighters, high-precision fire-control radars for antiaircraft guns, and airborne surface-search radars for locating submarines, long-range navigation aids, ship-borne air control radars for nighttime air operations, and high-power warning radars, among others.

The success of the Rad Lab rested on Vannevar Bush's work at MIT, ultimately leading to spoiling Goring's failed Operation Adlerangriff. Vannevar Bush and Harold Locke Hazen worked on one of the earliest analog computers to do differential equations, loosely speaking, calculus. The system they created was called the Differential Analyzer. Some of the early uses of the Differential Analyzer were used by the U.S. Army to calculate range tables for their artillery pieces (ballistics). These early analog computers were the predecessors for the first digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). In a letter to Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, on September 20, 1940, described the Differential Analyzer as a computational device that could facilitate the faster design of war materiel from airplane wings to ballistic. In 1936, "the father of information theory," Claude Shannon, was hired as a research assistant at Bush's lab to run the Differential Analyzer. Shannon's later contributions were the basis for modern encryption (cryptography) and the Internet. It's also likely that Dr. Deming worked with the Differential Analyzer and even the ENIAC while on loan from USDA to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, all of which are classified.

Fred Terman, director of the Harvard Radio Research Lab, which grew out of MIT's Radiation Laboratory (Rad Lab), also played a crucial role in this story. He also researched and developed electronic countermeasures to counter enemy radars and communications. Turman returned to Stanford after the war and was appointed dean of the school of engineering. After the war, he merged Stanford's business interests with private enterprises. Terman realized that university research in defense R&D was a tremendous opportunity for Stanford University. Terman recruited his former Harvard Radio Research Lab faculty members. Terman is considered one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley. His most notable contribution was being a mentor to Hewlett Packard founders William Hewlett and David Packard. He also convinced William Shockley to move to Palo Alto when he heard he was starting a new business in the semiconductor industry. William Shockley invented the first transistor, which led to future semiconductor devices and today's semiconductor-based technology. Terman helped Shockley hire some of his first employees. Electrical engineering students built semiconductor devices in Terman's lab. In order to help its graduates find jobs, Terman helped set up an industrial park on some vacant land. Following HP, GE, and Kodak, Stanford Research Park became one of the most successful research parks in the world.

Norbert Wiener worked with Vannevar Bush at MIT. Wiener's attention was drawn to the development of automatic targeting for anti-aircraft guns. Using physics, airplane design, and the pilot's thinking, he predicted the flight path of an enemy plane. Wiener argued that a gun could be mathematically calculated to automatically point where it would most likely intersect with a plane's path. His Antiaircraft Predictor was designed to observe an enemy pilot's zigzagging flight, predict its position, and launch an antiaircraft to shoot it down. When aiming a heavy gun barrel at an enemy target, you need to consider the temperature and humidity of the air. Wiener added a feedback system to compensate for these conditions. As a result, gaps between the Antiaircraft Predictor and the target aircraft were reduced. As the missile approaches the desired objective, it corrects itself as it goes.

Wiener's electronic manipulation did not end with halting Nazi air attacks. Wiener's desire to characterize the enemy pilot's actions and design a machine to forecast his future moves went beyond the pilot, even beyond the World War. With time, Wiener came to see the predictor as a prototype of not only the mind of an inaccessible enemy but also that of Allied antiaircraft gunners, and then, even more widely, of the vast spectrum of human proprioception and electrophysiological feedback systems. Proprioception is the ability of our body to detect movement, action, and location. We use it every time we move our muscles. Without proprioception, we would not move without considering our next step. Walking or kicking without looking at your feet or touching your nose while your eyes are closed are examples of proprioception. In the years following the war, the model evolved into a science known as "cybernetics," which included intentionality, learning, and many other aspects of the mind.

Cybernetics was Wiener's entry point to these machine-human systems. In the summer of 1947, Wiener coined the term cybernetics to describe what he hoped would be a new science of control mechanisms in which information exchange would play a central role. Cybernetics is the science of feedback, transmitting information from a system to its environment and back again. The goal of a feedback system is to maintain the level of a variable (e.g., water volume, temperature, direction, speed, or blood glucose concentration). Feedback measures the difference between the current state and the goal, and the system corrects any differences. As a result, dynamic systems, such as machines, software, organisms, and organizations, are more stable in the presence of disturbances.

Weiner's Cybernetics was developed independently of GST, but it soon became apparent that both approaches aimed to study the behavior of interconnected wholes. Unlike GST, cybernetics focuses exclusively on feedback loops of goal-directed behavior. Jeff Sussna, in his book Designing Delivery, says:

"Wiener and other early cyberneticians participated in a series of symposiums in the 1940s and 1950s called the Macy Conferences. These conferences brought together researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, including mathematics, biology, psychiatry, and sociology. Together, they hatched the beginnings of systems thinking, complex systems studies, and cognitive science. They explored the potential applications of cybernetics to everything from modeling the human mind, to rethinking psychological counseling, to managing businesses, to steering entire national economies."

Cybernetics influenced early computer and life sciences thinking, but it did not emerge as an independent discipline and fell out of fashion by the 1970s. Nevertheless, it was a bridge to modern systems thinkers such as Peter Senge, a systems scientist and author of The Fifth Discipline, and Donella Meadows, a research fellow at MIT, who was also influenced by these prior works, among many others. Meadows is an environmental scientist, educator, and writer. She is the lead author of "The Limits to Growth" and "Thinking in Systems: A Primer."

Recent developments in systems science have taken the form of complexity science, prominently associated with the Santé Fe Institute.

Note: A special thanks to Jabe Bloom for giving the jumpstart to start this research. Also, this is a very rough version of what I plan on including in my upcoming Deming book next year. I plan on using a bunch of additional fact-checking tools. For now use this as a informational enjoyable journey nothing more nothing less.