Systemic Inquiry

Origins

Although elements of systemic inquiry can be identified in writings since the Greek philosophers, systemic inquiry as we know it today derives from traditions established by people such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Warren Weaver, Norbert Wiener, and Gregory Bateson in the late 1930s and 1940s. Von Bertalanffy was a biologist who was interested in the extent to which biological concepts such as metabolism, isomorphism, growth, equifinality, nested systems, and steady state could be applied to other scientific domains. His interest developed into general system theory (GST) first promoted during the late 1940s. Around the same time, Weaver, a mathematician and engineer, was suggesting that science should distinguish between simplicity and what he termed organized and disorganized complexity. Also Wiener, Bateson, and others became interested in the idea of cybernetics—a more mechanistic version of GST that explores how feedback disrupts normal linear understandings of cause and effect.

By the 1960s these ideas, blended with parallel thinking from the organizational research and action research fields, had developed into a series of methodologies for assessing, problem solving, and intervening in complex, real-world situations.

Once established within the problem-solving and organizational research arenas, the ideas spread further into environmental, planning, social work, futurist, group dynamic, and other domains. By 2001, Eric Schwartz was able to identify 1,000 streams of systemic thought.

What is Systemic Inquiry?

Any attempt to summarize a transdiscipline like systemic inquiry is fraught with difficulties. Despite its relatively simple origins, the field has sprawled into many directions so that no single, universally accepted theory has emerged, and neither are there universally agreed definitions of basic concepts such as what is and what is not a system. Although we will find many definitions in the systems literature, many authors argue that single fixed definitions promote the kind of reductionist thinking that runs counter to systemic principles. Instead, they argue, the field should promote debates around methodological principles to create learning rather than fixed definitions—what Kurt Richardson calls “critical pluralism.”

None of this, of course, helps those entering the systems field to get a firm grip on the core elements. One way of understanding systems inquiry is through a series of historical perspectives of its development and application.

Gerald Midgley suggests that systems thinking and systems practice has evolved through a series of waves, or phases of research. Each wave related to a particular focus of the systems field and brought with it a new set of methods. Each wave emerged in response to critical evaluations of the logic and methods of previous waves. However, unlike real waves crashing on a beach, the foci and methods developed during the different waves of systems thinking did not disappear when a new wave came along. Rather, they continued to be developed in parallel with new ideas. Therefore, it is appropriate to talk about all the waves in the present tense.

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