How to Think About Systems
The goal of this section is to explore how to think about systems and to understand how systems modeling works.
Thinking about systems means modeling them—that is, describing and documenting them. Systems modeling is the process of creating descriptions of a system that help to understand and explain the complexity and structure within the system, as well as its interactions with the external environment.
Before creating a system, it is necessary to develop its description—or more precisely, a work artifact containing this description, which is the documentation. Implementing the system is much more expensive than producing documentation with its description, which is why, in the modern world, increased attention is paid to modeling the system as both a “black box” and a “transparent box.”
Modeling in systems thinking is the main tool for managing complexity. The challenge is that, in a project or within an enterprise, you are dealing with several systems, each of which must be described as both a “black box” and a “transparent box.” As a result, you will need to create multiple descriptions for a wide variety of systems and areas of interest[1]. Not only is the system of interest described, but also the areas of interest of the supersystem and the creation system, and it is often necessary to describe our system and the systems in the creation chains.
All of this would be difficult to accomplish if not for the universality of the approach to such descriptions. In this section, we will examine the concepts that will enable you to create system descriptions as part of a team of systems specialists. To do this:
- we will study approaches to describing any system as both a “black box” and a “transparent box”;
- we will examine specific types of descriptions for different areas of interest in project activities.
In our course and in the second semester of the main program, you will primarily work with a universal approach to modeling any system, while in the third semester, you will focus on describing all the systems involved in the project. ↩︎