Review of the System Theory as a Field of Knowledge — LessWrong
Companies send employees to systems theory courses to hone their high-load systems' designing skills. Ads pop up with systems-thinking courses claiming it’s an essential quality for leaders. Even some children’s toys have labels saying “develops systems thinking”. “An interdisciplinary framework for analyzing complex entities by studying the relationships between their components” – sounds like excellent bait for a certain kind of people. I happen to be one of those people. Until recently, I’d only encountered fragmented bits of this discipline. Sometimes those bits made systems theory seem like a deep trove of incredibly useful knowledge. But other times the ideas felt flimsy, prompting questions like “Is that all?” or “How do I actually use this?”. I didn’t want to make a final judgment without digging into the topic properly. So I read Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows) and The Art of Systems Thinking (Joseph O’Connor, Ian McDermott), a couple books that apply the principles of s