The Ultimate Key to Understanding Our World
Our world is full of stuff, and it's all connected in crazy ways.
You're a person with friends, family, and coworkers. All of you together make up society. This society is shaped by culture and driven by the economy, which comes from the billions of interactions between people like you.
The larger system we’re part of is trippy — and we haven’t even mentioned technology, politics or the media.
What we often see as reality, whether big or small, comes from the interaction of many individual parts. Reality is a system.
Systems Theory is all about studying the relationships between the parts of a bigger picture.
Whether it’s the weather, the economy, organizational culture, team dynamics, product development, or your personal relationships with your spouse, friends and family — all of these are systems.
Systems are more than just their parts. They have special features, like teamwork, borders, repeating interactions, feedback cycles, and the most amazing, emergence.
Emergence occurs when what the whole does can’t be explained by what its parts do — but only by how they interact. No interaction, no emergence. And in a system, parts always interact.
Systems theory is like a secret decoder ring for understanding the world we live in. It's the study of how everything is connected, from people to plants to technology.
In simple terms, the whole is more than just the total of its parts. To truly understand how things work, check if what you're dealing with is a system (it usually is). Then, see how the parts and their interactions affect it over time.