Purposefulness

【Topic 1: Problem Solving.  Subtopic 1.4: Purposefulness】

HOW to solve a problem (thoughts of 70’s)?

Regarding HOW, there are two schools of so-called “systems thinking”: one school regards systems as mechanical or systematic, i.e. philosophical views from reductionists whose reductionism says “the whole equals the sum of its parts”; the other regards systems as organic or systemic, i.e. views from emergentists whose holism says “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, or as the Nobel Laureate Philip W. Anderson said, “More is Different”.  This second school of thoughts has a long history dated back almost 100 years to British General J. C. Smuts (who writes the book "Holism and Evolution") but without being noticed.  However, today’s COVID-19 pandemic may awaken intellectuals that holism, not reductionism, is closer to the reality of nature world.  For example, if your bike has a flat tire, a patch of the tire can fix it.  However, if you have a heart problem, there can be different reasons – even a tooth ache may be related. We say bike is systematic while human body is systemic. Throughout our course materials published here, we take the holism view.

One of the great efforts about the 1972 book “On Purposeful System” is that its author Russell L. Ackoff defines clearly many terminologies of system thinking. Mathematics is used to define them whenever possible (so-called “formalization”), although he conceives these definitions are relative and evolvable through debating and comparison.  While many readers of the book may be bored by the amount of terminologies, I myself truly appreciate his effort because without it, the number of concepts is enough to confuse me.  I not only respect this great thinker, but also imagine how his teachings come about in his era (almost same era of my father): Before reading the book, I do research and write patents with state-of-the-art (SOTA) holism theories like quantum intelligence, complex adaptive system, dancing theory for conflict resolution, etc.  It is amazing how Ackoff puts together so many systems concepts in his era. Comparing his definitions with mine (e.g. quantum-related definitions of consciousness, intelligence and creativity), I sense some Ackoff’s concepts are evolved since.  It is now our work to update (1) his holism (or in his word “wholeness”) view suited for business problems, (2) his math derivation whenever quantum computing or AI theory can be applied.

The book has four parts:

Part 1 – Foundation.  The holism emphasizes that a clear purpose (the cause) of a system helps to define the its right meaning and its right actions (the effects) when solving a problem (purposeful, teleological, and functional are synonyms).  More importantly, the holism thinking maintains that human behavior derives its “functional concepts” like beliefs, traits, instincts, etc. rather than the other way around.  Therefore, most of this book does not intend to construct a definition hierarchy (except Chapter 15) but rather to detail functional concepts (i.e. terminology defining).  Consciousness is defined in Part 2 while intelligence in Part 1, although I feel consciousness is the base of intelligence.  This is because unfortunately Ackoff wants to define personality as a Foundation (Part-1) functional concept, as well as its related research terms, intelligence being one of them.  Intelligence is defined by combining knowledge and understanding.  Ackoff later (1999) forms his famous “DIKW Pyramid” where D is data, I is information, K is knowledge and W is wisdom.

Part 2 – Individual Purposeful Systems.  This Part involves three components of modeling. (1) Input – define inputs like perception, consciousness, and memory.  Here I think it is pretty narrow that Ackoff defines consciousness as part of perception, because if you lose consciousness, you cannot perceive anything.  (2) For model process Ackoff builds it totally on belief.  This sounds narrow but his definition of belief actually covers the following: course of action, possible outcome, possible state, efficiency and relative value.  (3) There are two aspects of output evaluation: (3.1) Individual feelings. These include definitions of satisfaction, hope, (happiness-related), regret, frustration, disappoint (sadness-related), fear, …, etc. (3.2) Thoughts and intuition. Ackoff takes intuition as some kind of emergent idea and thoughts is a proof process for that idea. However, I think emergent idea is more than intuition.  The reason Ackoff only defines intuition is probably: very few researchers define creativity and emergence (emergent idea) mathematically, while intuition can be defined mathematically much easier by intuitionists.  Finally, Personalities are now detailed as the DISC theory mentioned in previous subtopic.  However, these personalities are described in terms of objectivity / subjectivity vertically and internality / externality horizontally, somewhat different view from McWhinney’s personality. 

Part 3 – Interpersonal Purposeful Systems. This part treats interpersonal feelings, such as blame, sympathy, appreciation, love, hate, etc.  Interpersonal communication is described by 3 measures: information as changes in probability of choice, instruction as changes in efficiency of choice, and motivation as changes in relative value of choice. For readers, I think information is easiest to understand and motivation is the hardest to understand and confused when applied in real situation.  Next, Ackoff introduces functional concepts of sign, message, and language.  Human language is very difficult to model and to engineer, evidenced by recent progress of NLP (nature language processing, an AI branch, such as GPT2 or GPT3 technology).  The complex adaptive system we are going to introduce as a following subtopic will also touch language.  Ackoff also introduces the components of models of communication, where the interested ones are syntactic noise, semantic noise, pragmatic noise, syntactic redundancy, semantic redundancy, pragmatic redundancy and feedback.  It is easy to ignore the importance of these components, while it is a big deal to detect the noises and eliminate these redundancies.  Besides, semantics is a big research area.  It is also interesting to see the following functional concepts beyond the traditional communication technology for 2 or more talking parties: reward, punishment, threat, order, censorship, and editing.  Finally, the most important functional concepts regarding problem solving are introduced and defined: conflict, cooperation, and competition.

Part 4 - Social Systems.  Social system is simply an organization, for-profit or non-profit, or even an un-organized social group.  Again, from holism we study the organization behavior as a whole such as company product pricing, sales growth, profit, acquisitions, diversifications, or its contract with other companies.  These are group behavior without looking into individual member behavior.  Important subtopics of social systems are: functional division of labor, functional characteristics of organizations, types of organized social groups, the culture of social systems, and methodologies for social research.  Ackoff also brings up another interesting subtopic of Ideal.  In a company’s strategic plan, beyond end (short-range intended outcome), goal (mid-range intended outcome), objective (long-term intended outcome), you may need a fourth one: Ideal (ultimate intended outcome), which is unattainable but can influence organizational choice of purposes.  Ideal-seeking means a quest for omnipotence: plenty, truth, good, and beauty.

The total number of functional concepts formally defined by Ackoff’s book is 288.  There are still a large number of informally defined ones that are not counted. 

Besides Ackoff, there are many systems thinking theorists, such as Gregory Bateson, Ludwig von Bertallanfy, and those from the Santa Fe Institute.