You are part of a system that is part of a business, country, planet, solar system, galaxy and universe.
A general understanding of systems is really important because pretty much everything we care about as humans can be viewed as a system: our health, our families, our careers, and our countries. These are
the things that we wake up in the morning worrying about and studying how complex systems operate is a good framework for thinking about all of them.
There are a few key points that Gall makes in his book.
One is that not only do systems expand well beyond their original goals, but, as they evolve, they tend to oppose even their own original goals. Indeed, “Systems tend to oppose their own proper function”.
The end result is that systems rarely do what they say they do and people in systems rarely do what their title says they do.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel
1984, the Ministry of Peace was about promoting war and the Ministry of Love is about controlling the population.
The Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine gun nests. It’s funny because we recognize it’s true.
It’s not entirely clear what the purpose of the system known as
The Center for Disease Control actually does, but one can hardly argue in the wake of COVID-19 that it actually controls diseases.
This is not me ragging on the people that work for the
CDC. Indeed, it’s
quite the opposite. Complex systems can produce an outcome very different from what anyone inside them intends or wants.
The Congressional
disapproval rating from Americans has been hovering around 70-80% for years. Basically, no on likes Congress, no matter which party is in control. How can it be that the body elected by Americans is disapproved of by Americans? Why wouldn’t they just elect people they like better?
Well, in fact, they do. People generally approve of
their congressperson. It’s the system of elected officials known as Congress of which people disapprove.
Systems are
other than the sum of their parts. Just as a collection of Congresspeople that are supported by their constituents can produce a Congress that no one likes, many systems in general “work poorly or not at all
” for reasons that are not obvious nor intended.As the more popular Murphy’s Law goes,
“if anything can go wrong, it will.
” This is not just an offhand, pessimistic
remark, but a point that as systems become more complex, there are more ways for them to fail and the failures tend to be more expected.
A simple system, like say a
can opener, tends to fail in rather predictable ways: the blade becomes too dull or the gears don’t turn properly. A complex system, like the global economy, tends to fail in new and unexpected ways, say a supply chain breakdown following a global pandemic or a financial crisis following a mortgage bond structuring problem.
The general reaction to these problems is usually some version of “well, let’s just re-organize the complex system to work better.”
This is a version of
The Maginot Line Problem. The French tried to reform their defensive system after the First World War to prevent a German invasion, and yet the German invasion that launched World War II was far more effective than the prior one.
This approach always seems like a reasonable response. Every economic crash results in reforming the system and, yet, they keep on coming.
Humans tend to vastly overestimate our ability to design effective complex systems and it is this hubris that tends to get us in trouble, creating an
illegible margin.
It is extremely difficult (read: effectively impossible) to design a complex system from scratch and have it function well. The best complex systems start as very simple systems and evolve from there.Gall shows this in his list of elementary systems principles:
- A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it doesn't.
- A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works.
- Some complex systems actually work.
- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
- A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
The lesson from Gall then is that we should not focus on
top-down reforming of complex systems, but a more bottom-up approach. We should start with a working simple system and then let it build up over time.
Perhaps the best example of this would be why seemingly small and inconsequential startups seem to routinely overcome large incumbents.
Though it seems like they could shift, incumbents with the baggage of a built-up complex system cannot reform effectively. As Clayton Christenson showed in his book
The Innovator's Dilemma,
the popular explanation for this, incompetent management, is completely wrong.
In fact, the problem is that managers are extremely competent! They are just operating in an established and complex system with many competing parts that make it very hard to adapt.
What seems like the harder and longer path, starting with a new, simple system and evolving it over time, is in fact, the easier and shorter path.
The key lesson across all domains is to not focus on top-down solutions, but keep things simple and robust, giving up
short-term efficiency for long-term resilience, ultimately creating a
more ergodic outcome.