System Architecture: Strategy and Product Development for Complex Systems, First Edition

Chapter 3 Thinking about Complex Systems

3.1 Introduction

In Chapter 2, we explored system thinking and how to think about things as systems. A number of key ideas were introduced in Chapter 2, including the power of systems, form and function, entities and relationships, abstractions and emergence, and boundaries and context.

The approaches described in Chapter 2 were deliberately demonstrated on simple abstractions of systems with two or three important entities and relationships. This was done to focus the reader’s attention on the system issues rather than on the high level of complexity of systems we normally encounter.Many of the key concepts of systems thinking (such as the power of systems, form and function, entities and relationships, ...