Systemic development is a process of thinking about development which uses a systems thinking approach to create a solution to a social, environmental, and economic stress which the world is suffering from.
The core approach of systemic development is a process for thinking holistically while addressing complex issues and progressing towards a mutual goal with high participation rates. [1] The process encompasses comprehension of current activities and future needs from a holistic perspective. For success, it is essential that the process moves from an integrated assessment to a sustainable assessment. The perspective must consider the many facets of the current and proposed development including the economic, social, environmental, political and ecological aspects. The idea behind a systemic development approach can be applied to many disciplines, similar to sustainable development. Systemic development is practice rather than sustainability, which is an end state. [2]
General Systems Theory (GST) laid the foundation to systemic thinking. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy was known as the founder of the original principles of GST. [1] Prior to 1968, when GST was introduced in Bertalanffy’s book, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, the traditional approach to development used linear thinking or cause-and-effect thinking. GST was influenced by many different types of theories such as “Chaos theory, complexity theory, catastrophe theory, cybernetics, fuzzy set theory, and learning matrices” [2] In 1990, Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline , wove systemic thinking approach into development. [2]
The integration of ontology, methodology, epistemology, and axiology has formed an outline for GST. Together, these concepts and philosophies contribute to the theory of systemic development. [3]
Ontology is the most basic fundamental tool. In a systemic development approach, the first step is to define the boundaries, thresholds, and stakeholders. [4] Understanding what is, is crucial to understand the layers of complexity of the development needs.
Methodology in systemic development must consider all variables, values, and sustainability principles, and aim to ensure that no elements have been neglected. It is important to ensure completeness, comprehensiveness, and transparency of the assessment. [4] Mutual feedback and interactions between stakeholders should be modeled and assessed using carefully designed specific methodologies.
Epistemology stresses how dialogue and communication by the stakeholders are the key tools to systemic development. This is when the verification and confirmation of the facets of the development process are discovered. Insight from each stakeholder is important to enhance and broaden the perspective of all involved. It is essential to take these viewpoints into consideration because they influence the process, the trends, the drivers of change, and the interactions between the parts. [4] It is during this phase that learning is accomplished.
Axiologology emphasizes the ethical and aesthetic responsibility during the development process. It is important because the solution manifested by the systemic development process needs to represent the values of the represented stakeholders.
To successfully achieve development through a systems approach, holistic thinking is necessary. A holistic approach to a system thinks about each variable, the space between the variables and what defines the variable. “It’s the sum of the interaction of its parts” [1] In this process each individual must learn from each other to understand the whole system in a multidimensional way to find a solution. To think about development with a systemic lens, one needs to be able to see the whole instead of parts and understand the relationship between the parts, the way the parts move, what drives the behavior of the parts, what influences the flow or direction, and to understand why there are no more or no fewer parts. [5] The many factors that make up the whole can be a complex system.
Including many diverse stakeholders helps each individual to grow their own perspective, gain an understanding of others and to increase their creativity. Systemic involvement must strive for a transdisciplinary approach instead of a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to achieve successful development. [4] Transdisciplinary allows for the integration of methodologies and epistemologies through collaboration of the different stakeholders. Including more perspectives in the loop will increase the chance of a successful solution.
The foundation of systemic development, systems thinking, when applied, creates knowledge which leads to expanded knowledge, which leads to success. [2] Dialog is an essential tool for sharing knowledge and translating it into action. Communication can provide feedback and insight about “system, culture, practices, and artifacts and about the objectives and values of the project sponsor, client, and other stakeholders.” [2] Learning happens during the dialog process as each stakeholder comes to observe other stakeholder’s values and ideas about what successful development would encompass.
The Fifth Element, by Peter Senge, emphasizes the importance of learning to improve lives using systems thinking. Individuals who acquire information, knowledge, and skills from other stakeholders and the environment tend to experience a change in their own lives and livelihood. [1] They themselves then become the agents of change by sharing their knowledge with others. [6]
A feedback loop, closed loop, or systems complex model is a tool to help cope with complexity [4] and understand the system as a whole. The tool will help to visualize the direction, velocity, delay time, long term and short term effects, and to help see the dynamic process. Feedback is necessary to learn about each other, including objectives and values of stakeholders and officials. A systemic approach to development is change oriented. The approach must encourage humans to communicate through interpersonal interactions, address the values of each stakeholder, and take part in developing and understanding the complex loop. [5]
Systemic development is based on the principle that one must understand the complexity of the whole system to develop a solution. This can be accomplished by learning different elements in the system and applying them to their existing knowledge. We must learn about the past suggested solutions, the balance of the system, influx of the system, the challenges within the system, the best timing for each element, learning about uncertainty of cause-and-effect, the best leverage points in the system, the system does not work unless every piece is functioning at its prime, and there is no one individual at fault if everyone is working together. [7]
The goal of systemic development is to have community participants shift from being reactors to viewing themselves “as active participants in shaping their reality [to move] from reacting to the present to creating the future” [4]
The non-linear processes must coincide, be fluid and strive to benefit all parties involved.
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or human-made. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" by expressing synergy or emergent behavior.
In common usage, evaluation is a systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative to assess any aim, realisable concept/proposal, or any alternative, to help in decision-making; or to ascertain the degree of achievement or value in regard to the aim and objectives and results of any such action that has been completed.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
Systems science, also referred to as systems research, or, simply, systems, is a transdisciplinary field concerned with understanding systems—from simple to complex—in nature, society, cognition, engineering, technology and science itself. The field is diverse, spanning the formal, natural, social, and applied sciences.
Soft systems methodology (SSM) is an organised way of thinking that's applicable to problematic social situations and in the management of change by using action. It was developed in England by academics at the Lancaster Systems Department on the basis of a ten-year action research programme.
Holism in science, holistic science, or methodological holism is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. Systems are approached as coherent wholes whose component parts are best understood in context and in relation to both each other and to the whole. Holism typically stands in contrast with reductionism, which describes systems by dividing them into smaller components in order to understand them through their elemental properties.
Systems philosophy is a discipline aimed at constructing a new philosophy by using systems concepts. The discipline was first described by Ervin Laszlo in his 1972 book Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought. It has been described as the "reorientation of thought and world view ensuing from the introduction of "systems" as a new scientific paradigm".
Transdisciplinarity connotes a research strategy that crosses many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach. It applies to research efforts focused on problems that cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines, such as research on effective information systems for biomedical research, and can refer to concepts or methods that were originally developed by one discipline, but are now used by several others, such as ethnography, a field research method originally developed in anthropology but now widely used by other disciplines. The Belmont Forum elaborated that a transdisciplinary approach is enabling inputs and scoping across scientific and non-scientific stakeholder communities and facilitating a systemic way of addressing a challenge. This includes initiatives that support the capacity building required for the successful transdisciplinary formulation and implementation of research actions.
The idea of public ecology has recently emerged in response to increasing disparities over political, social, and environmental concerns. Of particular interest are the processes that generate, evaluate and apply knowledge in political, social, and environmental arenas. Public ecology offers a way of framing sustainability problems, community dynamics and social issues. Forests, watersheds, parks, flora, fauna, air, and water all constitute environmental quality and are therefore public goods. The processes society engages in to negotiate the meaning of these goods, upon which decisions and actions are based, reside within the public domain.
Holocentric is a philosophical position which focuses on solutions as the outcome of human agency and on critical thinking.
A glossary of terms relating to systems theory.
Decision intelligence is an engineering discipline that augments data science with theory from social science, decision theory, and managerial science. Its application provides a framework for best practices in organizational decision-making and processes for applying machine learning at scale. The basic idea is that decisions are based on our understanding of how actions lead to outcomes. Decision intelligence is a discipline for analyzing this chain of cause and effect, and decision modeling is a visual language for representing these chains.
Ecosystem management is an approach to natural resource management that aims to ensure the long-term sustainability and persistence of an ecosystem's function and services while meeting socioeconomic, political, and cultural needs. Although indigenous communities have employed sustainable ecosystem management approaches implicitly for millennia, ecosystem management emerged explicitly as a formal concept in the 1990s from a growing appreciation of the complexity of ecosystems and of humans' reliance and influence on natural systems.
Theory of Change (ToC) is a methodology or a criterion for planning, participation, adaptive management, and evaluation that is used in companies, philanthropy, not-for-profit, international development, research, and government sectors to promote social change. Theory of Change defines long-term goals and then maps backward to identify necessary preconditions.
A social-ecological system consists of 'a bio-geo-physical' unit and its associated social actors and institutions. Social-ecological systems are complex and adaptive and delimited by spatial or functional boundaries surrounding particular ecosystems and their context problems.
Systems-oriented design (S.O.D.) uses system thinking in order to capture the complexity of systems addressed in design practice. The main mission of S.O.D. is to build the designers' own interpretation and implementation of systems thinking. S.O.D. aims at enabling systems thinking to fully benefit from design thinking and practice, and design thinking and practice to fully benefit from systems thinking. S.O.D. addresses design for human activity systems, and can be applied to any kind of design problem ranging from product design and interaction design, through architecture to decision making processes and policy design.
Integrated modification methodology (IMM) is a procedure encompassing an open set of scientific techniques for morphologically analyzing the built environment in a multiscale manner and evaluating its performance in actual states or under specific design scenarios.
Raymond L. (Ray) Ison is an Australian-British cybernetician, systems scholar/scientist, and Professor of Systems at the Open University in the UK. He is currently President of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR). He was also Professor Systems for Sustainability at Monash University, and fellow at the Centre for Policy Development, and President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences in the year 2014-15. He is known for his work on systems praxeology within rural development, sustainable management, systemic governance and the design and enactment of learning systems.
Harbarian process modeling (HPM) is a method for obtaining internal process information from an organization and then documenting that information in a visually effective, simple manner.
Systemic intervention is a deliberate operation by intervening agents that seeks people to make alterations in their lives in psychology. This analyses how people deal with challenges in the contemporary era, including their power relations and how they reform relationship with others. Midgley ventured new approach to systems philosophy and social theory that could develop variety usage of the multiple strands of systemic thinking to systemic intervention. Scientific methods could be used as a segment of the intervention practice. However, it does not deal with all of the problems of systemic thinking as well as the science complexity.