Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

Part II The Systems Sciences

Now I want to talk about the other significant historical event which has happened in my lifetime, approximately in 1946–7. This was the growing together of a number of ideas which had developed in different places during the Second World War. We may call the aggregate of these ideas cybernetics, or communication theory, or information theory, or systems theory … . All these separate developments in different intellectual centres dealt with communicational problems, especially with the problem of what sort of a thing is an organized system

(Bateson 1973, p. 450)

A paper by Weaver (2003, originally 1948) helps us to clarify the subject matter of these “systems sciences.” Weaver argues that the traditional scientific method has been successful in fields characterized by quantitative and logical problems where its mathematical tools can gain purchase. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries it was able to tackle problems of organized simplicity involving a very small number of objects related in predictable ways (simple, deterministic). Weinberg (2011) calls this a region of machines or mechanisms. The problems it poses yield to the classical mathematical tools of calculus and differential equations. Newtonian mechanics provides the exemplar. In the late nineteenth century, with the advent of statistical mechanics (see Section 2.2), science was able to broaden its scope to problems of unorganized complexity consisting of huge ...