Social Systems Thinking Systems Systems are collections of parts whose relationships change relatively slowly, so they can be recognised as a whole. The behaviour of the whole is more than just the sum of the behaviours of the individual parts. Systems Thinking Systems Thinking is a collection of tools that allow us to understand what systems do, how they do it, and how to change them. It allows us to make some predictions of how systems will behave in the future. It is partly an additional set of tools which augment the ways in which we think about simpler problems and partly a method which selects the right tool for the job and acknowledges that the simpler tools may give a wrong, but potentially persuasive answer. Social Systems Social systems are systems whose main parts are human beings[1], but may be made up of smaller social systems and infrastructure. For example, a country such as Canada is made up of a population of about 40 million people, has a federal government and Provinces, has transportation systems, border control points, several education and health systems and more. The behaviour of social systems is more complex than that of inanimate systems for four reasons. Their principle parts—humans—are already very complex systems themselves. Many sources have claimed that the human brain is the most complex system in the universe (e.g. Patrick Kraus—The Most Complex System in the Universe)[2].Each human can play many different roles in different social systems which make up a bigger system and the way they play those roles differ widely between people in the same in ways that, for example, the a cog in a mechanical system does not do.We, the humans who are trying to understand the systems, are part of and shaped by the very systems we are trying to understand. And that shaping includes stories about how the systems workSocial systems change significantly while remaining recognisably the same system. We call this “history”.Social Systems Thinking Social Systems Thinking is a collection of tools that allow us to understand what social systems do, how they do it, and how to change them. Just as the simpler tools that are used to understand simple collections of things are not always adequate for systems, so the systems thinking tools for inanimate systems like clocks and heating systems are not always useful for understanding the more complex behaviours of social systems. InB4 There are many other species which form social systems, but for brevity on this site I don’t usually bother writing “human social systems”↩︎If each human brain is an example of the most complex system in the universe, isn’t global society—an interacting collection of eight billion of them—even more complex?↩︎ #Philosophy #socialSystems #socialSystemsThinking #systemsThinking