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Rural System? Just Dreaming …
A For-Profit Conglomerate for
Meaningful Jobs
Healthful Communities
and Improved Natural Resource Management
by Robert H. Giles, Jr., Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia
2007
Chapter 6. Using a Systems Approach
Dreaming: The silver slick slime of the slug produces a salivating dog frenzy.
Perhaps it is human-healing, wound-sealing, unlike the bat's bite.
Where do they stay before their unscheduled and missed annual curtain call?
Their be-shelled, rot rasping relatives have split the world into layers for each species
where they forever trudge with their mineral-hoarding shells,
awaiting the time of dryness …
but also the discovery of a mate to receive the love arrow in the duff darkness.
Just Dreaming …
| Given "Rural System," just what is a system? And what does "taking a system approach" mean? This chapter describes the rudiments of general systems theory and how they compose the best possible foundation for ways to overcome rural problems now and later. |
It will be good for people and natural resources if people understand systems and see the world as real or imagined general systems. A general system looks like the sketch in Figure 1 (previously in Chapter 3). Taking a systems approach may be for some people little more than gaining an
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| Fig. 1. A general system. "Objectives" are used in decision-making system while "outputs" or "outcomes" are used in most descriptive systems. |
The general systems ideas are not particularly new and are deceptively simple. Their applications are relatively new. The advent of widespread computer usage, particularly as such applications are related to the education of rural resource professors and agency leaders, has created such a radically different managerial context that the older systems ideas and concepts take on new meaning. That new meaning is loosely phrased a systems approach to things rural, especially natural resources and the people dependent upon them.
Specifying what is the meaning of taking a systems approach to an issue or problem always produces negative reactions because people have different perspectives on (1) systems, (2) approaches, and unclear things being "approached," (3) on the issue, and (4) because there are levels of difficulty, complexity, and sophistication. Some become judgmental or defensive about their selected level. Typically, the person adopting a systems approach will be (1) adding perspectives and points of view, and, simultaneously, (2) evolving in methodological sophistication in one or more areas. A systems approach may be:
A breakthrough already has occurred in the conceptual development of systems thinking and techniques. The developing family of ideas and concepts which fall roughly under the rubric of system theory amounts to a profound revolution in analyses and decision-making - "… a revolution which will transform human thought as deeply as did the earlier ones of Galileo and Newton" (Rosen 1972:508).
A systems approach has not been and will not be easily adopted as the major thrust of improved Rural System management. Thought patterns are already entrenched. The status quo has been hard won. Great effort and peculiar methods will be needed to escape from its influence.
A systems approach is value-free. A systems analysis of anti-Semitic activity or of an ill-advised big game winter feeding program does not make it "right." A systems approach can be used to achieve evil or socially-desirable goals. A systems approach, nevertheless, may be a very humanistic approach. Those adopting it typically deplore the waste of human potential. The approach encourages the building of systems providing optimally for human needs; it encourages the search for and achievement of the human potential through appropriate use of machines, in order to allow people to do best what they can do - respond, create, solve, observe, describe, and decide. When commitment to the systems approach is made by organizations, improvements of an unforeseen scope can be achieved. When only a few sensitive land doctors make the commitments, then even the few utilizing the computer to the full will very probably be able to manage the resource better than it is now being managed. Just as it is impossible to talk about marsh management without talking about dikes, it is almost impossible to talk about a systems approach without talking about computers. Those adopting a systems approach will usually become conversant with or actively use the computer. The computer is a mechanical slave, infinitely stupid, extremely fast, impossible to bore, a pile of expensive junk that will do exactly what you tell it, until you tell it to stop. The systems approach may, through the realities of the computer, concentrate on input, store tremendous amounts of data and information of all kinds, retrieve this information at great speed, select best choices from among millions of options and report results rapidly for assistance in decision making.
The systems approach does not require special tools or techniques but it does use them. The special methods of the systems approach are those of linear, goal, dynamic and heuristic programming; game theory; expert systems; critical path methods (CPM) and program evaluation and review technique (PERT); simulation; information systems, decision theory; tree and flow diagrams; and mathematical and computer modeling; and geographic information system applications. The methods which rely heavily upon mathematics and computer applications are not of themselves essential skills for the systems approach to be useful. The approach is practical for those who are not mathematically inclined and those not familiar with computers (see Laszlo l972 a and b, Kitching 1983) as well as others (e.g., Odom 1983, Starfield and Bleloch 1986,Swartzman and Kaluzny 1987).
The basic importance of the computer to the approach is not only the operations it will perform but also its liberating power to answer previously un-askable questions. It is a terrible taskmaster, requiring the most precise, explicit definition and communication. It is wonderfully logical and it carries computer workers, as its apprentices, along with its freedom, pattern, and strength. One delightful byproduct of the systems approach is that once problems are seen very, very clearly (as required for computer handling), their solutions are frequently very obvious and may not need computer use.
If the systems and the systems approach that were used in the past were compared with those of today and projected for the near future, then there would be a difference like that between the ox cart and today's top-line sports car. As one manager said, learning of the systems approach is like having played checkers all your life with buttons on a piece of lumber and then discovering chess and being given an ivory chess set. Through the systems approach, ecosystem management has the potential of resisting suboptimization, of economizing, of increasing public benefits, of gaining increased predictive ability, and of allowing professional resource managers to achieve their potential. If acceptance for the systems approach is gained, it can:
The method must now be applied, for the future looms larger than history.
Systems Analysis and Design
In taking such an approach, we are trying to see everything in nature, society, and business as related. We are trying to find efficient ways to make cross transfer of knowledge and procedures with other disciplines. Rural System staff discusses systems, work with things as systems, use them to assist in analyzing and designing ways to achieve human benefits.
Few people recognize the breakthrough in biological thought that was made in dividing plants into the taxonomic categories of monocots and dicots. It was a sweeping taxonomic strategy with profound effects on botany. A similar, profound, conceptual cut can be made by dividing all human intellectual activity into analysis and design. Such action is part of "the approach." Analysis and design are related and often overlap, but they are useful for thinking of systems and clarifying that thought (Fig. 2).
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| Figure 2. Systems can be analyzed or designed based on a manager's objectives. Inefficiencies occur when the separation is not made, but a continuing interaction must exist between the two. They should be viewed stereoscopically. The interplay is often, grossly with the question: What is my purpose (or objectives)? |
Analysis
System analysis means to describe, interpret, diagnose, or detail something as if it is or might be a system. It is the taking-apart portion of systems-oriented action. Putting it together in unique and practical ways is the action of design. To the statistically-trained person, analysis may have a misleading connotation of synthesis because of they use the phrase "analysis of variance" a statistical procedure, which is usually considered a synthetic methodology. In a formal sense, analysis of variance separates the types and sources of variance and helps provide insight into whether populations are really different or not. Even though a synthetic table and statistics result from the analysis of variance, it hinges upon breaking apart the problem.
Systems analysis is an attempt to set in order the facts of experience. Systems analysis is motivated by the refreshing knowledge that there is a way to handle a detailed analysis of even the most complex system. No computer is needed (although one can be employed for some purposes). What is needed is rigorous work with the concepts of Fig. 1.
A system analysis of a rural ecosystem involves making studies of lists of the inputs - energy, nutrients, existing biomass, water, topography, and others. It involves descriptions of the ecosystem processes - like photosynthesis. It requires definition and analysis of outputs: What are they really, and how are they best described? Animal units? Biomass? Calories per gram of animal bio-mass? Protein per acre?
Systems analysis is a common-sense approach to complex problems that often utilizes computers, operations research, cost-effectiveness analysis, simulation, and modeling. It often relies upon interdisciplinary teams. The successful system analyst (or team) must have a broad view of some problem and its interactions with other problems. The goal of the systems analyst is to approach problems in a large context so that proposed alternative solutions do not have undesired or unknown consequences in other related systems. By such analysis, the analyst can determine what will be the consequences of new inputs (e.g., fertilizer to a waterfowl area), or a new process ( e.g., to speed up certain ecosystem functions). After analysis, he or she can become more certain that likely outputs, whatever they are, will be achieved. If undesired outcomes are probable, then through proper feedback, he or she can modify either the inputs or processes to improve the output.
Systems analyses, although there are efforts made to make them so, are never objective. People impose their judgments, assumptions, and constraints on what they will analyze and at what level of precision they will work (i.e., will I stop at the biome, the forest, the stand, the tree, the forest-floor organisms, molecular interactions?) Analysis is predisposed by a value judgment about what is important, how much will it cost, how much do I want to know, and what will be the risks of not knowing or failing to reach the appropriate level of generalization or specification?
Even the most objective efforts are victimized by value, by judgments made by analysts. Thus, systems lie along a continuum between the potentials of being value-free and value-explicit. Synonymously, systems exist on a continuum of relative ability to satisfy people (Fig.3) The analyst deals with out-puts of systems, attempting to point to them, to name them, regardless of whether they are desired or not, without attachment of "worth" concepts.
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| Fig. 3. Most natural phenomena occur along a continuum of time or other function (x). Where the line is to be drawn between groups or observations A and B, or B and C, is a human decision. The differences between plants and animals is hardly a line but a zone of gray, since some organisms have characteristics of both. Determining wildlife subspecies by their color is a gradational decision. Separating socioeconomic groups is a human decision made along a continuum to produce satisfaction from increased order. |
Design
The designer, on the other hand, has an objective or goal, by definition a concept of "good" or that which is sought after. He or she describes desired results, not as outputs but as objectives (desired outputs). Systems are designed to achieve human objectives. These are specific outputs, made specific by the act of deciding what is good or desired, thus valued. Science tends to be analytical, more inclined toward a value-free end of a values continuum. Management tends to be design-oriented, more toward the value-explicit end of the continuum. "Design" also discussed in Chapter 3, connotes planning, building, synthesizing, and assembling. The word is used to mean other things, particularly in the literature of philosophy, art, and architecture. It is a human activity, the creation of all or part of a system. Whether it is implemented or not may not be important.
Often the design of a building is only achieved at the moment of ribbon cutting, since prior to that there are continual adjustments, substitutions, revisions, and adaptations in an heuristic involvement of architect, contractor, and client toward some final product. Design is a broad concept of prescription, blue-print, desired pattern, and management. The latter concept, management, is used grossly, almost arbitrarily. I wish to connote by design all that is not analysis. It is purposeful, goal-oriented action. The doctor, as designer, is an objective articulator, a prescriber, and monitor. He or she may be involved in the physical aspects of patient care, but that too is design. Design and implementation are a totally integrated concept. That the two are frequently done by different people (e.g., the doctor or the nurse, the rural consultant or the field hand) is of no useful importance to the concept of design. Design is the dynamic creation of an objective-achieving system.
Those working with rural managerial systems contribute the most when they:
Rarely is there a need in Rural System circles to design a brand-new system. Usually there is need to modify existing systems and/or to redesign them for solving problems, providing answers, or projecting alternatives for solutions. There are needs for fresh starts and complete1y new and creative designing, but such creativity in ecosystem related agencies is only rarely done. Great organizations will put at least a few people to work on such tasks. The results of their work can create welcome standards for comparison, provide a vision, and generate change, however slow and uncomfortable.
Systems design is subject to engineering logic. This is unlike scientific logic. A scientist (at least by some definitions) is not usually concerned with purposes and changing goals. These are the types of decisions engineers make. They are intent upon a goal such as how to make a profitable plastic duck - and design a system that will produce plastic ducks that sell for a profit. Engineers are definitely objectives-oriented.
The phrase "systems engineer" has become widely accepted. My delight at first discovery of this expression generated days of reflection and effort to recast all that I knew about game managers as "ecosystem engineers." The concepts are strained nowhere except that both "game" and "ecosystem" are too narrow. They do not provide a whole system; there were too many outlying species, interests, variables, and forces having profound influence on the Rural System. The phrase, "ecosystem engineer," as the designer and manipulator of natural systems to produce certain benefits, was on one hand too broad a definition for such management. (Civil engineers manipulate bacterial and physical ecosystems for sewage processing; city managers design and manipulate natural to semi-natural city ecosystems for humans.) On the other hand, it was too limited; it did not specify the source of the judgment of what constituted benefit. It did not suggest any of the sociological, demographic, economic, educational, or aesthetic characteristics of the users. Rural System management is the realm of activity readily called a design science. The work now called "ecosystem management" suffers the same problems. Ecosystem management as a philosophy and action program seems very large but does not, under the definition of an ecosystem, include the dynamic 5 E's discussed previously.
To design well is to design simply, to avoid denying the laws governing systems, to avoid suboptimization, and to achieve holism. Past the general admonition to "think" is the advice "think big." While appealing, neither, are helpful. They are as frustrating as teachers' pleas to think holistically. "How do we think in terms of wholes?" asked Fuller (1971) and answered it with "general systems theory." Past this generalization, there are guides for thinking holistically which, translated, means analyzing and designing large systems well.
How important is implementing a design can only be decided for particular situations. The design act of the doctor is his or her prescription. Whether the patient does or does not follow the orders given does not negate the doctor's design. The major needs in Rural System management are for design.
Problem Solving vs. Design
Much managerial literature speaks of "problem solving." I invariably translate situations, problems, crises, into a systems design framework and that requires, first, defining objectives. Problems are recognized in the space between the actual and desired performance of a system. Problems exist between the present status and the objective. To "This is a problem!" my question is, "As compared to what?" In the same manner, the greeting "How's your wife?(or husband?)" may get a reply "Compared to whom?" The real question for the manager is one of base lines and standards. Often the desired performance of the system is not known. By jumping to "the problem" the step of stating objectives is omitted. "Hazy ideas" will not allow solutions nor will excessive emphasis on constraints, impediments, and "people problems."
Taught in many universities, enshrined in manuals of many agencies, is the dictum: first, analyze the problem. The systems approach contests this basic premise, one which has served well but not well enough to avoid misuse of research funds or to keep people out of their present environmental plight. Problem analyses tend to focus on methods of study or operational approaches to overcoming evident causes of system entropy (e.g., a chuck hole in a road, problem bears or birds, bad-mannered hunters, or this year's drought). Problems disappear overnight as priorities and economics change and as people die or move away. Occasionally things are not as bad as they seem. The typical first step to problem analysis is to establish the context by rephrasing the problem positively as an objective and determining who is to solve it, in what time, with what resources, in what region. Then decide whether it will change of its own accord. As an example, a local game shortage might disappear as the simultaneous result of local emigration of hunters, shifts in numbers of hunters, and shifts in demand as a function of hunter age. "How to produce more game" may be the stated problem. Its validity should be tested.
"Deer damage to crops" is an apparent problem and "how to reduce it" may seem like a better analysis of the statement. The problem analyst will ask: "Who said so?" Maybe the deer are eating crops on the edges of the fields. Does leaf-eating reduce the harvestable amounts or the market value of the crop? Is the so-called damage constant each year, i.e., can deer be considered a part of the 5 to 10 percent natural variability a farmer must compute in his risk-taking behavior every year? How much does the farmer value deer relative to his alleged lost crop in net value? Not unheard of are game commissions spending time, using repellents, fencing, and other practices for farmers who will not allow public hunting (i.e., allowing deer to be reduced by hunting) on their lands.
The systems designer will help state an objective function such as: to design a system to minimize the ratio of the dollars of a landowner's foregone crop profit estimated at the beginning of the growing season to 95 percent of the total estimated profit from the crop at the beginning of the growing season on private lands on which public hunting is allowed. Objectives must be precise! (They do not have to be easily stated or understood by every high-school dropout.) Unless they are precise, any solution can be judged to be "just fine." A mix of damage-claim payments, habitat management, and education can result in significantly different local damage control systems.
The Analysis-Design Interaction
Wildlife managers must do some analysis to design well (Fig. 2). They must know the important structural members of their systems and their characteristics. To do good analysis, one must have designed, for that gives perspective and relevance to categories, and provides insight into appropriate levels of operation. A both/and philosophy is essential. Design must proceed, hand-in-hand, with analysis.
Skeptical students excitedly told of the analysis-design pair have asked crudely "So what?" I have never been satisfied with the question, or my answer. The significance is experienced in the satisfaction with logical categories, with the efficiency of clean separations and problem analyses and then easily directed efforts to solve parts effectively, with the pleasure and freedom (the homeostasis) associated with possessing a "no-surprise" general theory of knowledge.
In studying a problem, organizing a term paper, or undertaking a similar activity, a great desire arises to have clear, parallel, rationally-exclusive categories. Proper conceptual packaging is the substance of general semantics.
In a mundane sense, the analyst's job is to open an umbrella and have the desired topics covered. It is disconcerting for an environmental attorney to have overlooked a point, finding it to be at a critical part of a court trial and for it not to have been properly "covered." It is equally disconcerting for a wildlife professional to have spent a year developing a reprint system to find that the latest article will not fit any category without extreme forcing.
In research and development fields where innovation is so vigorously sought, it is common for topics to be new. They do not fit any category. Proper categories are also missing in new ecosystem management efforts. The budget categories no longer work; the allocation of time among projects is so difficult and has such inappropriate requirements that all conscientious staff feel stressed because they seem required to lie when making time-effort reports.
A deficiency of administrative structure and problem solving occurs regularly at county and watershed borders. One is always too large or small when problems arise. When a person opens an administrative umbrella, they will often find the problem not covered. Adjusting area boundaries has not solved the problem. Dynamic, task-specific regional boundaries can be selected by cluster analysis and can provide a solution to this problem. It is disconcerting, deficient, even dangerous to have analyzed a forest game management system and to have found that the effects of roads and trails on trout were never considered.
The concept that appropriate system categories are continuous and have adjacent categories is terribly difficult to move into practice. One effort in this book may seem to be to categorize, to make discrete. Traditional science has a powerful taxonomic base. The approach here is to close the circle, to demonstrate the usefulness of clear-cut, parallel categories and then, in the next instant, to see these categories as wholes, as units of a continuum. As an example of the difficulties created by over-categorizing, Moen (1973) showed that the wildlifer 's categories of food and cover are almost meaningless. They are mere zones along a bioenergetic continuum. The food needs of a deer on a south-facing slope in winter are much less than those of the same deer in deep snow on a north-facing slope. "Which is needed - food or cover?" is a leading question. The answer lies in "both," i.e., the unifying answer is that energy is needed. Whether food (as positive energy forage inputs) or cover (as reduced environmental energy drains) is needed is irrelevant. The proper question is: What are the net long-term energy needs and can they be met? When this question is asked and properly answered, then there will be fewer simplistic palliatives doled out by land doctors, paramedics, such as: Provide more food and cover.
Environmental problems are staggering in their complexity. Solutions to them can originate with analyses. These are often bypassed and solutions proposed which are merely directed at symptoms and not causes, or worse, treatments that are proposed will have harmful secondary effects greater than the problem itself. As one part of an ecosystem problem, there are those of wildlife. Virtually every environmental change can be demonstrated to affect wildlife. To analyze the wildlife problem is to analyze humankind's environmental system. When nothing seems to fit, when the old categories disappear faster than new ones can be produced, when discovery crashes the old formats and denies once-useful framework of conceptual constructs, then a powerful and epistemologically valid structure is needed. That structure is of the general system.
Design Suggestions
Frustrated managers try to pick pieces or to see a whole problem first (whatever the problem may seem to be). The result is delay; the whole is not seen at the outset. The first rule of the systems designer is begin. I once asked the staff of a national systems development corporation how they designed systems. To my inadequate question I received a joking but meaningful answer. "You sort of stomp your feet - like doing a war dance - and then you just do it." That answer was more relevant to me after developing several systems than it was then. The essence of systems-oriented designing is to start - anywhere - just to start. This means writing objectives, making a preliminary flow diagram, writing the components likely to be involved and using feedback actively.
This first step is the most difficult to take. It sounds so simple; the risks are quite low. The reason for reluctance is that the risks appear high. The first step may be prejudiced or on the wrong path. Even so, a systems orientation makes any losses easy to regain. This concept of bold initial design action may be judged wasteful, but once again the question must be: Compared to what? And the answer to that must be: Compared to the millions of unborn ideas of 10,000 educated environmental science graduates, foresters, landscape architects, and biologists, an elite class of a society of millions of people whom they have employed to serve them through designing systems. One functional system that solves problems or improves conditions is better than 1000 systems on the intellectual drawing boards.
The very concept of where to start is an enigma for the designer. In the instant of starting, narrowing the field of vision, he or she must also press for a broad, large subsystem view. All legitimate land use design to achieve long-term objectives must begin at the end. The end of the Rural System is the estuary, the confluence of streams, the delta, the narrow valley at the mouth of a watershed, the major unit of any land system. It ultimately determines the capacity of a system; it establishes, eventually, the potential of a land system to produce human benefits, ultimately the only rational basis for land design. By working with the land form for which many climatologic, physical, and hydrologic relations are known, the designer can rapidly gain predictive power. The estuary is the last place in a land system where human goals can be fulfilled by the major natural cycles - water, nitrogen, soil. If it is not seen as part of an objective, it needs to be viewed as a major constraint, i.e., achieve your objective … and then comes the trick: subject to retaining a quality estuary.
The general systems pattern has been emphasized and argued to be modular and easy to fit with other subsystems. By starting with the largest relevant system such as a watershed, as discussed in Chapter 12 and alternative concepts in Chapter 21 ), it is unlikely, by definition, that factors not included will negate the design. The watershed or crescent embraces most of the factors such as air, water, and human populations that significantly affect a private land ownership. Unless these are included in the design, the unit can only be suboptimal, a chip tossed by every wave of the regional economy or major ecosystem change.
The watershed itself is too limiting. It is at once too large and too small. My hope is that the willing reader will come to see that the watershed is a useful idea but inadequate. We need to model the unique, individual land cell, the map "picture element" or pixel the alpha unit of Chapter 12. In modeling the ecological factors at work in each cell, the modelers pull in all relevant factors in the cell. Then he or she pulls together also those from outside the cell - the soil erosion from the uphill cell, the pollution from the distant cells, the shadows from nearby mountains, the birds in a migratory route, the geology that ignores the surface topography, slicing and folding hither and yon in the land volume below the feet of the manager.
Seeing the objective(s) clearly is another concept of systems design. "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there," is a useful saying. It is impossible to design a system to achieve unspecified objectives. There are unscrupulous computer system designers who, because they have discovered few firms who really know what they want, will sell a system to achieve objectives they themselves specify. Years later, it becomes evident that the product is not exactly what was wanted, that it does not answer the right questions, or that it is so irrelevant that it is no longer used. Admittedly, it is often difficult to see objectives clearly. If this is recognized, then it is possible to design a system to help a group or person articulate objectives! For example, a relatively simple simulation could be employed to test a goal of e.g., "minimizing runoff." Such a statement may sound like a good objective, but perhaps there are associated problems with land tax rates, soil slumps, insects as disease vectors, and other undesirable consequences. The computer simulation can be used to test the question of "What if my objective is to minimize runoff and I were completely (100 percent) successful, then what would I do? If I had been only 95 percent successful? 50 percent successful?" The costs of each objective differently stated are very different. Doing nothing may seem to cost nothing but that denies the second-law principle and if a system is to be stabilized, maintenance costs will come due.
In systems work, box and arrow diagrams are often used.There are relations between organisms, people, plants, etc. symbolized by one arrow. (One elementary one was shown in Chapter 2.) There do not have to be interrelations which are symbolized by two arrows. Interrelations may be dependent or independent. For example, an elk eats forage from within a zone making it unavailable to big horn sheep. There is an elk-sheep relationship. I have the greatest difficulty agreeing upon interaction as descriptive of this relationship. The wild sheep in no way, to my knowledge, significantly influences the elk. (Of course, it too eats food, but the behavior, magnitude, etc. of sheep grazing is irrelevant to the elk manager.)
In a complex system, the number of possible interactions, I, is:
I = v (v - 1) / 2 .
The v's symbolize the structural components of ecosystems, considered to be at the vertices of complex polyhedra. A 10 factor system might be sketched as 10 points around a circle with 45 double-arrows showing possible interrelationships. The potential relations, R, in such systems is:
R = v (v-1).
R symbolizes the count of every component being related to every other component in a system. My ecological heresy is: Few systems have interactions. Relations, however, are abundant in ecosystems. A non-system, an unrelated assemblage of components, is expressed as v, a minimum state of relationship. Completely integrated systems exist in the realm between actual and potential relations. The index to the minimum is v; the maximum is calculable as R. What if a particular system of v components has a number of observed relations, R*? A theoretical maximum interrelatedness exists which can be called Z and has the value of 1.0. Therefore, the expression
Z = R* / R.
That model states that the larger and more fully integrated a system is, the larger will be the value of Z. By manipulating each of these relations, a manager can achieve a desired system response about an objective (such as suggested in story #13, Fig.2.2 in Chapter 2). If each relationship could be weighted according to its "strength" or 1.0 minus the risk of failing or being broken, additional refinement in the relatedness of the system can be achieved. The more loose ends and the more pseudopods or, appendages there are to a particular system, the more likely they are to be broken or sheared off. There is greater likelihood for a single strand of relations than a triangulated relation to be disturbed. If a break occurs, then the old system gains a new identity(s). Whether that is good or bad is a question of the objectives of people.
Feedforward
A part of the designer's task, the same as that of any user of the systems approach, is that of employing feedforward. The designer of a system like Rural System operating under the feedforward concept will attempt to conceive of the entire relevant system of the future and to design now, in the moment, but for that time. The present design, if it is to be judged excellent, must come close to meeting the needs of today's people (perhaps suboptimally), and yet be likely to be very useful (probably suboptimally) when the targeted future arrives - all at reasonable costs. Feedforward is not future-telling or forecasting but the results of that which the designer really believes will happen. Then he or she starts preparing for that. It will be wrong for now, costly, but best over the longrun. Only humans have ability to see the future and act upon it. Feedforward was omitted from early general systems work.
Limitations
There are limitations to the systems approach. No tool, no approach to a problem as large as sophisticated modern natural resource management will summarily solve all problems. A systems approach is powerful, but not all-powerful.
The usual condition of the dynamic leader of a resource program is "tired." He or she can only see the advocacy of a systems approach as "more that must be done" while he or she already suffers an overload. More broadly, the environment seems buffeted by a hundred adversities. It is a hard time to grow up, let alone grow strong. Keeping on will not suffice. The systems approach is required. I am aware of the arguments against the approach. Most of them are not problems of the systems approach but of people themselves and disagreements about what is good.
Many of the objections assume that systems will not function properly. It is true that they will not or cannot under certain circumstances; however, systems failure does not negate a systems approach. Sabotage does not negate an industry's usefulness; a nurse's idiocy does not deny a doctor's competence. James E. Webb (1969: 67), former administrator of NASA, fired a broadside criticism at the systems approach. He said, after some praise of general systems theory:
Even a casual reading of the literature of the systems school will reveal, however, that it too is severely inadequate to the aggregate of requirements of the large-scale endeavor. It tends to give generalizations based upon special and often highly artificial situations. Sophisticated mathematics and conceptual model building without the essential foundations of detailed observation and first-hand study, seem only too often to constitute the base of its generalization. Too often, also, the computer becomes the master of the systems disciple rather than a useful tool in his hands. There are, consequently, serious difficulties in transforming into practice many of the rather nebulous concepts of the systems doctrine. The doctrine falls particularly short with respect to what Chancellor Aldrich of Columbia University called "the interface between rational hardware engineering/operations research considerations and the non-rational, non-quantitative persuasion considerations." The doctrine, further, is concerned mainly with the internal workings of the organization. This is in contrast to the requirements of large-scale endeavors, in which the notions of system and participation have to be expanded to include a variety of outside participants and outside forces. Within the systems doctrine, the organization is viewed as the system. This creates a parochial environment in which larger objectives and large environmental requirements, which are so important for complex undertakings, tend to be ignored."
I believe I have answered or suggested ways by which all of the difficulties raised by Mr. Webb can be met. Limitations to the systems approach are listed below. Counters to most of them would only be repetitions to parts of this book. I list the limittations, hopeful of dispelling claims of naivet&#eacute and of further solidifying the positive theme of this book, which remains, even in the glare of this list, that a systems approach to rural resource management is essential.
The main limits to a systems approach are as follows:
Perhaps a poor approach, a well-operating systems approach will have healthful feedback mechanisms that will prevent it from being poor very long.
Objectives are extremely difficult to define. The systems approach will not make that task go away or become easier. Until it is done, systems will be created to solve many unreal problems and answer many unasked or irrelevant questions. Few rural resource problems have been formulated clearly. They are often stated in such vague terms that any approach to mathematical or objective treatment has been hopeless. Lack of objectives will continue to be a limitation in using the systems approach, especially in rural resource management. It is one limitation that I am confident can be overcome when managers see the reasons for doing so and see the approaches described herein for doing so.
We have an artful and informed "clinical" style, one that is as quantitative as possible, rationally robust, invariably using heuristics or different means of discovery to a tentatively useful solution. We may change, but we see that for the near future, humans decide best about what data are needed, the timeliness of answers, the likely costs, and the gathering procedures. Many of these are non-sequential. We've experienced that computers make better decisions than managers. They are more precise in stating the optimum. We believe that the issue to be resolved in deciding upon a systems approach is not one of accuracy or precision but one about the consequences over time and to whole populations of people related to the alternative actions.
Time will be needed to take a systems approach to rural management. Since computers emerged on the national scene in the early 1950's, rapid strides have been made. They have had tardy entry into resource management except as data analyzers and payroll handlers. Time will be needed for rural land managers to catch up. Time is also needed even for those who comprehend the systems approach to develop systems and to get them functional. Time is needed to take developments and sub-systems that have the same structure (isomorphic) from other fields and apply them to rural-related problems, to adapt them, and to learn how to use the answers effectively.
Systems often get very large, quickly. There is an unconscious effort to squeeze in events of low probability. That limitation is the manager's, not the approach's. By sticking to the principle that the fundamental mission of the system must not be jeopardized in order to accommodate events of extremely low probability or to which the goal is insensitive, effective systems can be designed and operated.
Sooner or later it must be recognized that to adopt a systems approach is a decision. Decisions require risks. The scientific approach involves a decision, but one so preformed that it is rarely made. It happens. The unspecified risks are assumed. This book is about making a decision and taking risks. The danger is fully as great as the general's overestimation of the role of the V-2 rockets in Germany. This strategy consumed fantastic resources but played virtually no military role in World War II. The risks may be great and the answer to the question, "Can we afford them?" is the counter-question, "Can we afford not to take them?" A parallel thread of negative questioning accompanies the above. It is: "Just because we can, must we?" I have reached the low-risk decision and I hope that will be the readers'…that there's no viable alternative but to do so.
General systems and their properties and systems analysis and design have been outlined. The ideas are not particularly new and are deceptively simple. Their order and application are relatively new. The advent of widespread computer usage, particularly as such application is related to the education of wildlife professors and agency leaders, has created such a radically different managerial context that the older systems ideas and concepts take on new meaning. That new meaning is loosely phrased a systems approach to things rural, especially natural resources.
I am not critical of those who used poultices the day before penicillin, or suffered polio before the Salk-Sabin vaccines. The systems approach is an evolutionary jump, a response to new, growing problems. The solution comes at a time when it is badly needed. It is not a cure-all, but it can cure if accepted for all its strength.
Next, Chapter 7, making more explicit the comments about objectives within the systems approach and the objectives of Rural System.
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