Question

What is Russell L. Ackoff trying to say in the two statements below?

1.)"improving the performance of the parts of a system taken separately will not necessarily improve the performance of the whole.”

2.) “Systems thinking is holistic, it attempts to derive an understanding of the parts from the behavior and properties of wholes rather than derive the behavior and properties of wholes from those of their parts.”

Answer 1

1. In the easiest sense, we can say that Russell Ackoff is trying to tell us that when we consider a system in isolation, any change we make to it has a 50-50 chance of having no effect on the entirety of the system. With that being said, when we try and increase the efficiency of the processes separately, without relation to one another, the change may not reflect in a positive manner. One change that makes a process good in isolation, may slow down another one, creating what we call a bottleneck.

2. Russell Ackoff says that thinking about a system is a holistic process. What he means by that is based on how a system operates. A system is never operating solo. The most efficient systems make use of good subsystems which make use of other subroutines in order to be able to provide proper functionality to the entire system, just like cogs do in a wheel. We can, therefore, say that the efficiency of the system can be described as the whole sum of its parts and not the different parts acting separately. No metric value which describes the system as a single unit can be considered to be effective and thus, we can say that a system needs to be considered as a fundamental function made up of a number of different functions and not in the view that the different functions form a system.