What is a system?
Think about it – we use the word system countlessly many times in our lives; for an instance, the e-ticketing system you use to plan and book tickets for your upcoming holiday, the traffic management system which manages the road traffic in your city, the public transportation system which you must have used to commute to college, work, and the education system comprising of schools, colleges, testing agencies of which you are currently a part of. The list is never ending and there are a lot more making a large zoo of systems around us.
It’s surreal that we come across a countless number of systems in our lives, but we look towards them locally, based on a reductionist view, the cause-and-effect mentality, and not at all as a holistic picture. This blog aims to bridge this gap by intuitively explaining Systems Science in an undergraduate accessible manner and inculcate the habit of a holistic systems thinking in daily life.
Getting back to describing a system – let’s have a quick look at the definition first,
“System is a set of interacting components, coherently organized in such a way to bring out a characteristic behaviour, perform a function or satisfy a purpose.”
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Okay, I can understand; it is indeed too much. Let’s not try and gobble it all at once. Let’s dissect it piece by piece.
By, ‘System is a set of interacting components’ we mean, every system is made up of elements; they can be humans, plants, animals, or for that matter, even inanimate objects. All these together form a system - but wait a minute, do these components form a system in isolation, don’t they talk to each other? The answer is YES; the elements interact via physical flows, information exchange, and many different forms. Then comes ‘coherently organized’, i.e. the elements interact in such a way that as a whole, they ‘bring out a characteristic behavior, perform function or satisfy a purpose’.
Putting it concisely, a System has 3 important traits -
- Elements
- Interactions OR Inter-connections OR Inter-relations
- Function OR Purpose
To cement these concepts, let’s take an example of your school or college – whose internet services you might be using right now, to read this page! :P
Let’s start with what functions a school performs – the first thing that pops up is ‘Knowledge dissemination.’ In a school, professors and senior students exchange and pass on their knowledge and experience to the juniors, which reciprocate the same, thus continuing the transfer of knowledge in newer generations of society. To accomplish this mission at hand, a school sets some rules which govern academics, extra-curriculars, grading policies of students (which you might hate the most, don’t worry, same here! :P) and a host of other things. Students, professors, administration staff, laboratories, equipment, classrooms are the elements that make up the school system. The set of rules governing all the activities at school, your relations with your professors, their teaching, grade allotment form the inter-connections between the elements. And finally all of these interacting elements, as a whole, perform the function of ‘Knowledge Dissemination.’
You must be wondering that as a student, you might want to study, get good grades, get a good job which might not be in tune with disseminating knowledge. That’s the essence of the nature of systems, it isn’t necessary that the functions/purposes of the elements match to that of the system. A professor might want to become the Head of the Department, a student might want a good job, get good grades, an admin might want to get a promotion, but all these acting coherently, in a quest to achieve their own objectives, accomplish the objectives of the system.
That’s the beauty of the Systems architecture! However, this non-aligned-ness in systems comes at its own cost. More on that sometime later!
Let me leave you at this point, try to think of examples which can be seen from the systems lens, we will look at some more exciting traits of systems, the next time I post!