Book review: Systemantics¶
I read the book Systemantics by John Gall. I saw some reference to it from another book, and Systemantics was short, so I figured why not. In the end, I’m glad I did - while it’s not scientific book, it’s given me a way to put various problems into words, which will probably be useful.
The Wikipedia page linked above describes the basic contents pretty well, so I won’t try to give a very long summary of the contents here and instead focus on what I got from it.
Summary¶
The book is basically about “systems”, as in collections of interacting elements - in particular ones of humans working together. Think bureaucracies, recruitment processes, supply chains, etc. You’d think that making a good process (= “system”) to handle something is easy: make the process, apply the process. But in reality almost everything is strongly interacting with other things, and what works in theory almost never works in practice. There are plenty of anecdotes, stories, and philosophies about things.
Some of the more important points include:
A working big system has always grow out of a working small system.
You can’t just transplant a working big system from one place to another. You can’t really fix up a non-working complex system, you have to start over.
Systems always grow, and when a system gets too big it always starts to fail simply because of how complex things get when many parts interact. (Just think of how many sayings we have about things not working, such as Murphy’s Law. It’s almost like in life, we expect things to not work by default.)
Any changes tend to have unintended side-effects
“Do it without a system if you can”, then “do it with an existing system if you can”, then “do it with a small system if you can”.
Thoughts on the book¶
The first thing that became apparent was this book doesn’t take itself too seriously - it’s full of humor and almost sarcastic at times. Still, it makes you think in a way that is useful, just as a reader you need to apply plenty of your own thinking.
One of my most memorial examples of this hyperbole is about ships and logistics. The book gives an example of how global shipping has grown out of control, until the engineers, in their quest to expand the system, have apparently forgotten that ships need to go into harbors, and the latest large oil tankers are too large and must be loaded and unloaded offshore. Well, sure, ships grew too large, but the system adapted because this is more efficient. It wasn’t somehow forgotten. (Still, the purpose of the example is make you think about things growing without bound.)
If you can use a critical mind and look through this, you can see various insights into human behavior. I probably say it isn’t goundbreaking, and it isn’t original research, but reading it will help me to put thoughts into words, which will help me in my communication later on.
There are definitely connections to the book I read “The Innovation Delusion” which has the main hypothesis that people like making new things, but very rarely there is value of keeping existing good things going.
Relevance to my work¶
I work in a university that’s relatively new - it was merged from parts that are much older, but many of the processes being made are new. Those parts are being made in a more complex regulatory environment with greater demands both on the community and from society. That means we are trying to make many new complex systems.
In short, there are plenty of times research has to do something new: new laws or needs require something else (personal data protection, security, research ethics, etc.). What happens each time at my university? Let’s make a new process to deal with it! We end up with many parallel processes (systems) trying to do the same thing. Quite often, lots of work is put into them, and most of the community doesn’t even know about it (despite the community taking part being critical).
We shouldn’t try to make things perfect at the start. Start small and grow.
We should accept imperfection if it means systems are more loosely connected, it’s less bad than strongly connected complex systems which probably won’t work anyway. There’s an opportunity to grow.
Start small and usable and slowly grow to be better.
Use existing good processes and slowly expand them to cover more use cases, when the purposes are close enough.
