Replying to LO24890 --
Hi Joey
> I have a question for long about the methodology of systems thinking.
> Recently, I have read a book by Robert Flood, named Rethinking the Fifth
> Discipline, which is a deep reflection to Senge's work, and it's mainly
> talking about systems thinking. ST, as Flood noted, have various
> approaches, from Beer, Checkland to Ackoff, but their works rarely
> mentioned on MIT's Systems Dynamics approach.
>
> Why is it(Senge's work) so focus on SD's approach, when we are talking ST?
[...snip by your host...]
I have discussed some of this on another thread called Being and Becoming
which Richard will post soon.
I also discuss this on my web site in brief what I call the Problematic
Paradigm Grid, but briefly TOC is a derivative of EKS devised by Wolfgang
Mewes it is a bottleneck theory. It uses slightly different premises to
solve problems.See my site http://sites.netscape.net/gavinritz/ under
Systems Thinking.
The key is to understand what variables are being used and what level of
abstraction. TOC does not seek a variable but rather an energy build up
rather like a evolutionary jump. To drill down to the key bottleneck can
take years and the bottleneck also moves as the interactions of variables
change over time. see Kaufmans NC model. The light bulb experiment
describes this very nicely. Also how variables attract each other and the
interactions(like spirals of energy)
I am an energy fan but this process cannot always be effectively applied
and the SD approach is very useful up to what is a level 4 mental
processing or multi-variable parallel processing bi-conditional variables
or the Boolean concept of "if and only if" as parallel processing cross
inter-actional variables.
Hell that sounds like a mouthful.
The normal laws (Aristotle) of thought i.e. identity, LEM and
non-contradiction are all a level 1 and 2 mental processing meaning using
the Boolean concepts of or/or and and/and or the nominal (naming) and
ordinal (ranking) number scales. e.g. the well known Kepner Tregoe process
is a level 3 mental process or the conditional variable "if then" (see
Holland's Echo Model).
The simple answer to your question is knowing specifically what variables
you want to model, then use the model best suited to that. None are better
than others and none actually can move into the highly abstract problem
solving area and none are close to the so-called GST.
To quite Deming some models are useful others are not (I add) under
differing conditions
Kindest
Gavin
--Gavin Ritz <garritz@xtra.co.nz>
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