TB871: Systems as waves on the edge of catastrophic breakdown
Note: this is a post reflecting on one of the modules of my MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice. You can see all of the related posts in this category.
There’s a wonderful reading from Stafford Beer in the chapter of the Systems Thinkers book on him. Beer was in Chile as part of his work on Project Cybersyn, and used his surroundings as inspiration:
The little house where I have come to live alone for a few weeks sits on the edge of a steep hill in a quiet village on the western coast of Chile. Huge majestic waves roll into the bay and crash magnificently over the rocks, sparkling white against the green sea under a winter sun. It is for me a time of peace, a time to clear the head, a time to treasure.
(Beer, 1974/1995, p.197)
Apart from that sounding idyllic, Beer also used the waves as an example of a dynamic system:
Let me propose to you a little exercise, taking the bay I am looking at now as a convenient example. It is not difficult to recognize that the movement of water in this bay is the visible behaviour of a dynamic system: after all, the waves are steadily moving in and dissipating themselves along the shore. But please consider just one wave. We think of that as an entity: a wave, we say. What is it doing out there, why is it that shape, and what is the reason for its happy white crest? The exercise is to ask yourself in all honesty not whether you know the answers, because that would be just a technical exercise, but whether these are the sorts of question that have ever arisen for you. The point is that the questions themselves – and not just the answers – can be understood only when we stop thinking of the wave as an entity. As long as it is an entity, we tend to say well, waves are like that: the facts that our wave is out there moving across the bay, has that shape and a happy white crest, are the signs that tell me “It’s a wave” – just as the fact that a book is red and no other colour is a sign that tells me “That’s the book I want”.
(Ibid., p.199)
I’ve been saying recently that I need to spend more time thinking about verbs than about nouns, which is part of what I think Beer might be saying here. We need to focus on flows rather than considering entities we see (or conceptualise) as static. He continues:
The truth is, however, that the book is red because someone gave it a red cover when he might just as well have made it green; whereas the wave cannot be other than it is because a wave is a dynamic system. It consists of flows of water, which are its parts, and the relations between those flows, which are governed by the natural laws of systems of water that are investigated by the science of hydrodynamics. The appearances of the wave, its shape and the happy white crest, are actually outputs of this system. They are what they are because the system is organized in the way that it is, and this organization produces an inescapable kind of behaviour. The cross-section of the wave is parabolic, having two basic forms, the one dominating at the open-sea stage of the wave, and the other dominating later. As the second form is produced from the first, there is a moment when the wave holds the two forms: it has at this moment a wedge shape of 120°. And at this point, as the second form takes over, the wave begins to break – hence the happy white crest.
Now in terms of the dynamic system that we call a wave, the happy white crest is not at all the pretty sign by which what we first called an entity signalizes its existence. For the wave, that crest is its personal catastrophe. What has happened is that the wave has a systemic conflict within it determined by its form of organization, and that this has produced a phase of instability. The happy white crest is the mark of doom upon the wave, because the instability feeds upon itself; and the catastrophic collapse of the wave is an inevitable output of the system.
(Ibid., p.199-200)
Beer was writing in the 1970s, but could already see that humans were living in systems that aren’t viable. We place our trust in institutions such as the family unit, the church, educational institutions, and the like. But the truth is that doubling-down on what he calls “the rules of the societary game” won’t help weather the storm much longer (Ibid., p.200):
Indeed, we ought to face the fact that this theory does not work now. People convince themselves that it does, because they see society as an entity, and its main characteristic is to be held most dear. Then they grit their teeth and declare that whatever is wrong with it must and can be put right again. Broken barriers, swept away by permissive morality, can be repaired… The starving two-thirds of the world will eventually be fed (well, not those two-thirds dying right now, but their descendants). And somehow a finite planet, with exhaustible resources, will be made indefinitely to support more and yet more growth.
(Ibid., p.201)
How prescient. As he points out, the above would only be possible “if we are dealing with a fixed entity” where working a little harder would make a difference. The truth is that society, no matter what the conservatives of this world might tell us, is not a fixed system.
But if society is a dynamic system all these phenomena are not simply blemishes – they are its outputs. These unpleasing threats to all we hold most dear are products of a system so organized as to produce them – to produce them, and not their contraries. These are not accidental; and they are not mistakes. They are the continuing output of a systemic conflict which is due to specific modes of organization. And those modes of organization have currently arrived at a stage in their inexorable pattern of behaviour which, like the wedge-shaped wave of 120°, is incipiently unstable – on the verge of catastrophic breakdown. Or so I think.
(Ibid.)
To survive, then, we need to understand the world as a dynamic system. Only then can we change it. I wasn’t born at the time when Beer was writing these words, but I wish the adults in the room had heeded them. (I wish the adults in the room were heeding them now.)
References
- Beer, S. (1974/1995). Designing Freedom. London: John Wiley. In Ramage, M. & Shipp, K. (2020). Systems Thinkers (Second Edition). London: Springer. pp.197-201.
Image: Ivan Bandura
