Structural Thinking

Structural thinking sees the world as a complex structure composed of nodes, relationships, and interacting feedback loops. Once the structure is modeled, simulated and understood the fundamental behavior of the system becomes plainly obvious, making the system’s response to solution efforts predictable.

By contrast, event oriented thinking sees the world as a complex succession of events. An event is a fact that happened or will happen. In this world view knowledge consists of a gigantic collection of haphazardly organized facts and the order they occurred or will occur in. Understanding is based on knowing what event causes another event, which in turn causes another event, and so on. The drawback is there is no underlying structure which can provide an overall pattern, only a confused jumble of events.

The central tenent of structural thinking is that the behavior of a complex system cannot be correctly understood without thoughtful contruction of a model of the key structure of the system, and computer simulation of that model.

The best tool we know of to do this for social systems is system dynamics.

Why We Prefer the Term Structural Thinking

Structural thinking is the term we are beginning to prefer to the more common term of systems thinking. Too often, systems thinking means thinking of the system as a whole. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. While true, this is not enough. Unless you are explicitly modeling the structure of the problem of interest, systems thinking is usually pseudo systems thinking.

For example, here's a description of the masters program in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability, at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. The program was created by The Natural Step and Sweden: (Italics added)

"Society within the biosphere is inherently a highly complex system. This programme is founded on the basic premise that to achieve 'success' – i.e. a sustainable society – within such a complex system, success must be understood at a fundamental level. Achieving success requires a systematic and structured approach to planning and decision-making. In particular, there must be a focus on an imagined principle outcome of success as a "sustainable society in the biosphere". From this understanding, one can "backcast" to the present and begin to take action as part of a clearly focused strategy.

"The entire programme will revolve around an intellectually strict model for making systematic progress towards an attractive and sustainable society. Built on a total systems perspective and a scientifically relevant world-view, it is widely known as The Natural Step framework, an internationally recognised methodology for guiding strategy towards sustainability. It is a generic and therefore widely applicable approach to sustainable development at multiple scales (e.g. global, national, business, corporate, community and individual)."

This quote is a shining example of pseudo systems thinking, which occurs when problem solvers think they are using true systems thinking, but are not. All the right buzzwords are there. But what matters is not. Examination of the Natural Step Framework shows its central conclusions about how to solve the sustainability problem are based on no structural analysis at all. They are based on an intuitive hunch that if we can just get the world to adopt this list of sustainable practices (These are called The Four Systems Conditions for Sustainable Human Society According To The Natural Step), the problem will be solved. This solution has of course failed. Why? Pseudo systems thinking was substituted for structural thinking.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this problem. Jay Forrester, in this post to the Creative Learning Exchange list, wrote that:

"Systems thinking is an amorphous area and means different things to different people. It does not have an underlying theory or structure. Worse, it is based on intuitive understanding of systems, which is usually shown to be incorrect when the systems thinking discussion is converted to actual simulation models for verification and analysis. I believe that the drift toward systems thinking and away from explicit simulation is apt to be harmful to the understanding of systems."

The tendency toward pseudo systems thinking can also be seen in this definition of systems thinking from Wikipedia, as copied on November 16, 2007. Caution: This is quoted as an example of pseudo systems thinking, not as a good definition.

"Systems thinking is a social approach using systems theories to create desired outcomes, or change. It is unique approach to problem solving, in that it views certain 'problems' as a part of the overall system so focusing on these outcomes will only further develop the undesired element or problem. [1] Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system will act differently when the systems relationships are removed and it is viewed in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole.[2] Standing in contrast to Descartes', scientific reductionism and philosophical analysis, it proposes to view systems in a holistic manner. Consistent with systems philosophy, systems thinking concerns an understanding of a system by examining the linkages and interactions between the elements that comprise the entirety of the system.

"Systems thinking attempts to illustrate that events are separated by distance and time and that small catalytic events can cause large changes in complex systems. Acknowledging that an improvement in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system, it promotes organizational communication at all levels in order to avoid the silo effect. Systems thinking techniques may be used to study any kind of system — natural, scientific, engineered, human, or conceptual."

Notice there is no mention whatsoever of capturing and simulating the structure of the system. That is buried much further in the entry. Even then, it's given light emphasis:

"Systems and the application of systems thinking has been grouped into three categories based on the techniques used to tackle a system:

"Hard systems — involving simulations, often using computers and the techniques of operations research. Useful for problems that can justifiably be quantified. However it cannot easily take into account unquantifiable variables (opinions, culture, politics, etc), and may treat people as being passive, rather than having complex motivations.

"Soft systems - For systems that cannot easily be quantified....

"Evolutionary systems - ...."

No where in the Wikipedia entry for systems thinking is "structure" even mentioned. The closest it comes is "a 'system' is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit."

Thus the consensus seems to be that modeling a problem's structure and then running simulations to see how that structure behaves is an inconsequential part of systems thinking.

Which is why we prefer the term structural thinking.