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Overview

Your body is a system of various organs that work together to keep you alive. Your heart pumps blood, your kidneys remove waste from your blood, and so on.

But what about a soccer team? Or a company? Could they be considered systems too? Absolutely! Systems are everywhere, and some are more obvious than others.

In this passage, you’ll learn about systems and how they work. Systems are everywhere in our world: your body is a system, the solar system is a system, even the economy is a system. You will also see that feedback plays an important role in these systems as well as how corruptions can occur within them. Also, don’t expect to get four bushels of wheat from your field if you only put ten pounds of fertilizer on it because two bushels was all you got last time with just ten pounds of fertilizer.

Big Idea #1: A system is a group of connected elements with a shared purpose.

Have you ever paused to identify the different systems around you? If so, you’d see that they’re everywhere—from your body to your favorite football team to the company you work for and the city where you live.

That’s because a system is simply a group of elements, connected by relationships and paired with a purpose. These elements can be both tangible (e.g., roots) and intangible (e.g., academic prowess).

However, whether the elements are physical or not, they’re still connected to each other and work together. For example, in a tree’s system there are relationships between its parts like chemical reactions and photosynthesis. In a university’s system there might be standards for admission and testing.

The purpose of a system is defined by how the system behaves, not its stated goals. For instance, a government might say that it has a goal of environmental protection, but if it doesn’t put its money where its mouth is (i.e., actually do something to protect the environment), then environmental protection isn’t really the government’s purpose.

The relationships and purpose of a system will determine it, even if its elements change. For example, a football team might acquire an entirely new roster but still play with the same relationship between positions and unified purpose of winning games.

Furthermore, the behavior of a system breaks down into stocks and flows that change over time.

There are two types of quantities: stock and flow. Stock is the quantity at a given time, which can be counted or measured. For example, water in a bathtub or money in a bank account. Flow is the change over time of stock as a result of inflows (additions) and outflows (subtractions). Examples include births and deaths or purchases and sales.

Here’s how they each work. Stocks are the elements of a system that can be accounted for at any given time. For instance, water in a bathtub, books in a store or money in a bank. On the other hand, flow is the change in stock over time as a result of <spa

Big Idea #2: Every sustainable system relies on some kind of feedback for stabilization.

Now that you know about stocks and flows, it’s important to realize that they’re constantly changing. This is because when changes in stock affect the inflows and outflows of a system, it’s called feedback.

There are different kinds of feedback. If a force stabilizes the difference between the actual and desired levels of stock, then it’s called balancing feedback. Such feedback is based on rules or laws that relate to the level of stock and have the ability to change it.