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Seeks A Nail
December 25th, 2009 by Gary
Hipworth
For many hundreds and perhaps thousands of
years the main way people have been taught to think about the world has been analytical – meaning that nature is
viewed as a giant machine composed of individual elements that are separate from each other, distinct and
measurable.
To understand how something worked, one only needed to pull apart the individual elements and learn how each
element reacted with one other element.
With this worldview, knowledge is always fragmented and we have become a species of specialists - when the only
tool you have is a hammer then the problem must be a nail!
The dominant ideas turned out to be a struggle
for survival (man against man against nature), the mind/body split that has resulted in man’s increasing sense of
alienation, and the division of labour.
The specialists focus on detail and disregard the wider context of reality. Where is the whole picture in all this
detail? What about our relationships with each other and with nature?
The sorry answer is that in the classical or analytical worldview, the whole is nowhere to be found. Deep in our
hearts and minds we both know that something is out of balance. It may have a lot to do with our dominant
analytical worldview. It has taken us far away from reality as it actually is!
Whole means literally, ‘strong and healthy’.
The analytical approach has given us tremendous
power over things – it has enabled us to become technologically brilliant because we have learned how to invent
better mousetraps.
The downside is that we have lost sight of the big picture and the importance of our connections with each other
and with nature.
If we want to change the world or preserve it or have the satisfaction of knowing it,
then we need to have a model of reality that can help us understand the complexity of modern life without just
trying to simplify things that cannot be simplified.
You need such a model in today’s chaotic and increasingly uncertain world – that is unless you have access to
ultimate reality through illumination or ‘channelling’.
Any offers?
Well, systems thinking is a magnificent 'new' way of seeing the world and being in the world without relying on the
supernatural.
By systems we are referring to natural, living
systems, not mechanistic systems invented by man (where the individual parts have no choice or freedom).
Systems thinking allow us to understand ourselves as participating complex, organised, whole systems with free
will, within other complex, organised, whole systems.
Systems interact with other complex organised systems in a hierarchy of levels, from the cell to the organ, to the individual, to the group, to the organisation, to society, to the world, to the galaxy and to the universe.
Specialists look at the detail and look at
simple cause - effect relationships.
Systems thinkers, on the other hand, concentrate on overall structure and relationships on all levels of reality,
and fit detail into the general framework. Systems thinking has a flexibility and structure that readily adapts to
the complexities of our dynamically changing business environments.
It is the closest that the sciences have come to a unifying theory that includes all living
things.
