The Tenth Law of Systems Thinking

Before we move on to discussing levels and flows, let's pause to consider how we should measure... anything.

Pareto principle

Everything gets Pareto'd to death these days. And when that doesn't help, people Pareto on top of Pareto. An example of this can be found in the Socio-Economic Impact Assessment System (SEIAS) report:

• 19 016 people are killed per year in South Africa
• x% are female (detail omitted)
• 57% of women killed are by husbands or boyfriends.
• In y% of these cases, a firearm is used. (detail omitted)
• In 75% of these cases, a licensed firearm is used.

75% sounds like a big number, but it is a large percentage of a smaller percentage. Of another smaller percentage of yet another smaller percentage.

Apart from misrepresenting the impact, it does not take into account how the system will react to any changes. It assumes that if we remove a slice of the pie, the other slices will remain constant. And the size of the pie will remain constant. In a society where power is in the hand of the physically strong, the percentage of murderers who use other means to kill their partners can simply increase. Remember Snoopy?

"Gun control legislation was working, but there was an increase in stabbings."

Medical Research Council - 2014

Analysis and synthesis

Seeing "whole elephants" does not mean that we can't break down (analyse) information to understand an issue. But it does mean that we need to take care when we put the pieces of the proposed system back together (synthesize.) Peter Senge describes when to look wider:

"Incidentally, sometimes people go ahead and divide an elephant in half anyway. You don’t have two small elephants then; you have a mess. By a “mess,” I mean a complicated problem where there is no leverage to be found because the leverage lies in interactions that cannot be seen from looking only at the piece you are holding."

Peter Senge - The Fifth Discipline

We'll consider leverage in the next post.