System (S) is one of the four basic patterns of thought. Forming systems is the process of breaking ideas down into parts and seeing how they fit together.
All types of thinking and fields of knowledge form systems with their ideas. Its a universal pattern of thought. When we form systems, we break ideas into parts and combine them into wholes.

...take notice of parts and wholes

Think about your gerbil for a minute. What makes up your gerbil, besides cornflakes? Its an animal, its a pet, its fuzzy, its hyperactive...the concept of "gerbil" has a lot of parts. But each of those parts is a whole idea too. Someone's idea of "Pet" could be made up of "animal," "domesticated," "friend," "expensive," or a completely different set of parts depending on who you ask. And very different ideas can have many parts in common. Maybe your brother is a fuzzy hyperactive animal. Is he a gerbil? Doubtful. Every idea is a part, and every idea is a whole. When we think, we view ideas as parts of systems, and as whole systems with their own parts. All the way to infinity and back.
If you want some real-world examples that paint the whole picture of systems, read the Systems Around Us section. If you just want the nuts and bolts, skip to Systems Defined.

Systems Around Us

The Atom and the Universe: Early Indian and Greek philosophers proposed that the universe was made up of indivisible atoms. In the 17th and 18th centuries chemists offered a physical theory of the atom's indivisibility. But in the 19th and 20th centuries physicists discovered subatomic components and structure in the atom. The atom, literally meaning "not-cuttable" (a = not tomos = cut), was cuttable into smaller parts.

The term universe literally means, one whole. It was originally meant to mean "everything" and was not thought to be a part of anything larger. Today, cosmologists, physicists, astronomers, philosophers, theologians, and fiction writers have proposed a multiverse (or meta-universe) that includes multiple universes. The whole seems to be part of an even larger whole. From atoms to universes, part-whole structure is alive and well.



A Familiar Example: Russian matryoshka nesting dolls are an excellent thinking toy for older children to understand the embedded nature of Systems with one caveat: most wholes are not made up of a single part but contain many parts. ThinkBlocks were designed to contain many parts for this reason.




Specious Categories: Grouping things into systems is universal, but groups we make usually aren't. In biology, creatures are placed in groups called "species," and these species are placed in trees. Not maples, but abstract branching systems called "taxonomies." But biologists have trouble agreeing on how to define these categories. Sometimes they group creatures by DNA similarity, other times by their physical appearance. Whether you think a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, you can't deny it's a part and a whole. Our desire to classify is often frustrated by "outlier" phenomena like Zenkeys , Wholphins , and Polar-Grizzly Bears . Indeed, some evolutionary biologists go even further. Allen MacNiell argues that, "individual living organisms are the only things that exist in the natural world, and that species (including animal species) are quite literally figments of the human imagination." Take a look at the various ways biologists conceptualize 'species' here .
The Case of Cats, Geckos, Roofs, Rats, and the Plague: The World Health Organization's "Operation Cat Drop" offers a lesson in how the parts that one includes in a system is vital to understanding and problem solving. In the 1950s, the island of Borneo was experiencing problems: the Dayak villagers fell ill with the Bubonic Plague, roofs in many homes caved in, and dead fish washed up on the shores. The first proposal was to treat the villagers' illness. Medicine provided by WHO dealt with the human suffering, but why were there so many rats in the first place? The cats in the village were hunting geckos instead. Geckos had always been too fast for the cats, but the scientists were left scratching their heads. Dead fish, falling roofs, gecko-eating cats, and the Plague? The villagers and researchers eventually understood the many interrelated parts. WHO had earlier combated the island's malaria problem by destroying disease-carrying mosquitoes' habitat with the chemical DDT. This same DDT affected geckos, slowing but not killing them directly. The island's cats began hunting the easy prey, allowing rats to move in and infect the villagers. The DDT was also killing the fish. And the roofs collapsing? It turns out that caterpillars were chewing through parts of the roofs. The geckos usually ate those caterpillars but quit when their food source was tainted with DDT. If they considered only one part of this system, the scientists could only make incremental progress. On the other hand, the scientists were able to create a solution by looking at the parts and the whole. WHO quit using DDT to control malaria and introduced healthy cats into the ecosystem to solve this complicated problem. You can read more about the Borneo cats here . An excellent simulation of the Borneo cats can be downloaded here . You will need the viewing software here .
Mapping part-whole systems: Social workers often use Eco-maps to assess a family's circumstances. By graphically organizing the relationships between a family and the many parts of their environment, the social worker is able to identify and isolate negative influences on the family.


In the film Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) is a collector of objects related to his family and those close to them. It is a map of sorts through which he is trying to find the meaning of the objects in order to discover the deeper connections between the individuals on the wall.
Similarly, doctors and psychologists use Geno-grams to chart the history of illness within a patient's family.
All hands on your nymydoche: Two people are walking through a secluded forest, and find an old tire. One says, "It looks like someone was here."
"Yes," the other replies. "And his name was Goodyear."
Parts have identities and others, and that identity sometimes defines the whole...in interesting ways. Nowhere is part and whole identity more clear than in figures of speech, like metonyms and synecdoches . These literary creatures don't have horns...usually. Metonymy is representing something with something else that's commonly associated, like "all the crowns in Europe" means all of the kings of Europe, not literally all the crowns. Synecdoche lets a literal part stand in for a literary whole...like "all hands on deck" means "all sailors go to your posts." Unless you're on a cruise with the Adam's family, and then anything can happen.
With both of these figures of speech, a part of a concept stands in for the whole. "Crown" is part of the concept "King", and "hand" is part of the concept "sailor." When the captain asks for all hands on deck, he defines the sailors' identity in terms of their part..."hands". In the context of the ship, the identity "hands" has a specific other: the "rest of a sailor." The identity of the part "hands" defines the identity of the whole (its other), the sailor. So using the part as the identity works, because with its implied other it defines the whole. It also draws attention to the important parts. After all, the captain likes his whole sailors, but what he wants is their functionality...the "hands."
A crafty author will use Distinctions/Systems dynamics to get to the heart of things...if you're talking about the functionality of kings and soldiers, a better label than their abstract titles is there "action parts"...their crowns and hands. (They can leave their good breeding and taste for port at the door...the people just want the figureheads, and the captain just wants the labor.) Letting the essential part define the whole takes an abstract and nebulous concept and biases it towards its meaningful features, invoking more powerful and functional imagery. More metonymy and synecdode here .

Math Manipulatives: One of Piaget's students, MIT professor Seymour Papert, took the idea of constructivism in a new direction and called it "constructionism." This school of thought proposes that children not only build knowledge but need to build it literally, in physical forms or models. Another vote for Legos and blocks. Having established the link between constructionism and the benefits of experiential, tactile learning, Papert focused his later research on the importance of haptics (touch and kinesthetics combined) and visual learning. Educators often look for “better ways for the teacher to instruct.” Instead, Papert advocated giving students “better opportunities to construct.”

In this case “better” means more concrete. Fraction tiles, a manipulative math tool, offers an excellent way for children to work hands-on with part-whole thinking. The simple tiles are made to be placed in a rectangular tray so that the parts fit across horizontal rows to make each row add up to one: one whole. For example, the number one is a single tile that spans the width of the tray. To illustrate halves, two equal tiles fit together to fill the same space. These are both labeled “1/2.” The model continues in this way until the smallest available fraction fills the last remaining row, say twelve tiles, each labeled “1/12.” With these, the children can handle fractions. They can compare the sizes of the fractions and come to grasp the concept that five fifths and eight eights equally make up one whole. They can also begin to work with simple math functions, such as adding or subtracting functions.
For smaller children, there’s the pink tower. Created by Maria Montessori, this manipulative allows little ones to explore relationships of scale within a system. Their task is to stack graduated pink wooden cubes into a perfect tapering tower that comes to a point. Handling and placing the cubes, the children come to understand how each relates to the next. They must make distinctions to determine the order in which the blocks are placed. They must also see the blocks in relationship to one another. It is clear--and satisfying--when all the parts add up to the whole: behold, a pink tower.
3 Seymour Papert, The Connected Family (Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1996).

Networks: "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking." --Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Network theory is an exciting new field of universal importance because it provides a model for any system one might be interested in: the Internet, the spread of disease, social networks, epistemological networks, DNA, and molecular networks, to name only a few. An area of applied mathematics, network theory uses graphs to chart relations of all kinds--or how one part is related to another in a whole. Here we have a confluence of two patterns of thinking, systems and relationships.
One fascinating spinoff of network theory is the small-world phenomenon. This is the concept that there’s an average of six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet. This idea captivated pop culture in the early 1990s when Six Degrees of Separation hit the movie theaters. Adapted from John Guare’s play by the same name, the film version got Stockard Channing an Oscar nomination for best actress and launched Will Smith’s inspiring and inspired career.
In academia, a network model on the small-world phenomenon was first published in 1998 by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, out of Cornell University.
Using a lattice model, they demonstrated how short random links, in surprisingly small numbers, drastically reduce the diameter between two points--the diameter being “the longest direct path between any two vertices in the network.”
Here, two points means two people. However far away from each other, a few short links shrink the distance between them. Thus, as the links in our world increase, there’s a heightening of the small-world phenomenon. The world gets smaller.

4 Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks,” Nature 396 (4 June 1998). This article can be viewed online at __www.tam.cornell.edu/tam/cms/manage/upload/SS_nature_smallworld.pdf__ (accessed February 1, 2009).

Ecological Thought Styles: When we approach any topic or field of study on multiple levels--especially with a view to the interconnectedness of all the levels--we have entered an ecological thought style. For example, epidemiology, the study of disease in a given population, now includes a subfield of eco-epidemiology. This branch concerns itself with analyzing disease and viewing “health in terms of dynamic states influenced by factors on multiple levels, such as the cellular, the individual, the community, and the population.” Thus, the focus expands outward from the very particular to the general, each part contained or nested within the next level. It’s the matryoshka dolls again.
Before the term eco-epidemiology was coined, early examples of multi-tiered thinking in the study of disease included “John Snow's work on cholera during the Sanitary era, and Joseph Goldberger's work on pellagra during the Infectious Disease era. Each challenged the dominant ideas of the time by considering the changes in social and biological context that gave rise to an epidemic, the individual behaviors that increased the risk of disease or its transmission, and the cellular and molecular processes underlying the pathophysiology.”
Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees. But sometimes we can’t understand the tree without seeing the forest.

5 See __http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon__ (accessed November 19, 2008).
6 Dana March and Ezra Susser, “The eco- in eco-epidemiology,” __http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/6/1379__ (accessed November 18, 2008).

Systems in the News System happenings in current events.
August 23, 2006 An article from CSRWire: The Newswire of Corporate Social Responsibility about systems in business, and thinking systemically about them.

Systems Defined

All Systems are of a common form: A System is a relationship between part (individual identities or relationships) and whole (the set of identities and relationships) (See Distinctions and Relationships). This is the definition of a a System and is noted as follows: (S = p w).
The unique dynamics of Systems are caused by the infinite embeddedness of the part-whole relationship. This means that all wholes are parts of greater wholes and all parts are wholes in themselves, made up of lesser parts.
Four rules of Organizing Systems:

• every whole is a part
• every part is a whole
• the parts in the whole
• the whole in the part
• The organization of these is specific to the structure and function of systems

The central idea of systems is three-fold. First, we all organize things into systems; all fields of knowledge use systems. This means that using systems as an organizing tool is a universal pattern of knowledge. Second, all systems are of a universal form: the infinite embededness of (S | p,w). Third, the systems function allows knowledge to be organized hierarchically and for explicit distinctions to be nested as systems. The combination of the Distinction and System functions causes boundaries to form, but these boundaries are embedded and often overlapping (See Perspectives)
Recognizing the embededdness of part/wholes forces people to recognize and redraw boundaries or to make analogous comparisons; it forces interconnections to be made.