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Overview

Your body is a system, which means that all of its parts work together to keep you healthy. Your heart pumps blood throughout your body, your kidneys filter out waste and other things, and so on. In essence, the various organs in your body are connected by their relationships with one another.

But what about soccer teams and companies? Are they also systems? Of course! There are many different types of systems in the world. Some are more obvious than others.

These key points take you on a journey into the world of systems. They’ll explain what systems are, where to find them, and how they work and sustain themselves.

In this key points, you will learn why feedback is important to systems; how a system can be corrupt; and why you won’t get four bushels of wheat if ten pounds of fertilizer yielded two bushels.

Big Idea #1: A system is a group of connected elements with a shared purpose.

Have you ever thought about systems? If you have, then you probably realized that they’re everywhere – your body has a system of organs and cells, there are systems in football teams and companies. The city I live in also has a system to it.

A system is a collection of elements that are connected by relationships and paired with a purpose. These elements can be visible or intangible, such as the academic prowess in universities.

In a system, all the components are held together by relationships. For instance, in the human body, our cells depend on chemical reactions and metabolic processes to survive. In a university setting, students must meet certain standards to get admitted and pass tests in order to graduate.

The purpose of a system is to do something.

That’s defined by the system’s observed behavior, not its stated goals. For instance, a government might say that it has a goal of environmental protection, but it doesn’t actually do anything about it. Therefore, environmental protection is not the government’s purpose as it isn’t reflected by what it actually does.

It’s important to understand that a system will always be defined by its relationships and purpose, even if the elements of the system change. A football team might have an entirely different roster every season, but it will still play as a unit with one goal: winning games. Furthermore, systems are made up of stocks (things that tend to stay constant) and flows (things that tend to change over time).

Here are two ways to do that.

Stocks are elements of a system that can be accounted for at any given time. For instance, water in a bathtub, books in a store or money in a bank. On the other hand, flow is the change in stock over time as a result of inflows and outflows. Examples of these are births and deaths or purchases and sales.

Big Idea #2: Every sustainable system relies on some kind of feedback for stabilization.

Now you know about stocks and flows, but it’s also essential to understand that they’re constantly changing. That’s because when changes in stock affect the inflows and outflows of a system, it’s considered to have feedback.

Some feedback is good, and some feedback is bad. If a force stabilizes the difference between the actual level of stock and the desired level of stock, then it’s known as balancing feedback because it helps to balance out those two things. This type of feedback can be in the form of rules or physical laws that relate to levels of stock and have the ability to change them.

A thermostat is a device that controls the temperature in a room. It does this by balancing out heat from a radiator and heat escaping through windows. When the temperature falls, it tells the heater to turn on.