A History of Systemic Thought: The thinkers and quarrels behind systems thinking

I was running feedback loops in my own procurement long before I had the name for them. A vendor adds a surcharge, so I place a counter-order to lock the old price, which nudges the vendor to move the price again, which changes what I order the month after. That is a loop with a delay, the exact thing Jay Forrester later drew as stocks and flows. I did not know that. I only knew the cycle kept biting me and I could not see the far end of it.

This book tells the genealogy, the people and the quarrels. Warren McCulloch chaired the Macy conferences in New York from 1941 to 1960, where neurophysiologists and engineers argued cybernetics into being before scattering back to their own departments. Ludwig von Bertalanffy published General System Theory in 1968 and never fully reconciled his biology-rooted view with Wiener's engineering-rooted one. Forrester created system dynamics at MIT and wrote Industrial Dynamics in 1961; his method became the World3 model behind The Limits to Growth in 1972, the most attacked systems artifact of the century. The Santa Fe Institute, founded in 1984, turned the questions toward adaptation and emergence and away from control. Niklas Luhmann borrowed autopoiesis from two Chilean biologists to argue that society is made of communication, not of people.

The point underneath is plain. Words like feedback, emergence, and self-organizing migrated out of the technical literature and into management decks and self-help, where they get invoked with almost none of the original mechanism attached. Knowing where an idea came from is what separates using it from name-dropping it.

This is a short book about the history of systems thinking in plain terms, about cybernetics and general systems theory, system dynamics and feedback loops, complexity science and complex adaptive systems, social systems theory and autopoiesis, and the difference between a tradition and a vocabulary.

This book is written from an Indonesian operator's context, but the ideas it traces belong to no one country and travel easily into other emerging-market and small-business work.