Systems thinking makes me uneasy

There is ‘something’ in systems thinking which makes me uneasy. I had a similar feeling at my first encounter with process development in the mid 1990s, which consisted of 1) defining the processes, and 2) making sure people followed the processes. I remember I thought that people are not machines!

I agree that an organization is a system, a set of interdependent parts forming a whole. My point is that an organization is much more. It’s a ‘living entity’, more like an organism. Yes, an organism is also a system, but there’s a fundamental difference between something living and non-living. Do we make a clear distinction? I don’t think so.

Vladimir Dimitrov writes that “… systems thinking acknowledges the power of self-organization hidden in complex social dynamics, but considers it as something that needs to be harnessed and put under control in order to serve the system’s goals, as far as these goals (objectives, aims, targets, purposes) have the highest priority in systems thinking.“¹ I think this is what makes me uneasy! It’s perfectly alright to control machines, but it’s not okay to treat people as machines or machine parts. Organizations are not machines!

Notes:
¹ Vladimir Dimitrov, A New Kind of Social Science: Study of Self-organization of Human Dynamics, p. 191.