In: Systems Thinking: Foundation, Uses and Challenges ISBN: 978-1-63485-223-4

Editors: M. Frank, H. Shaked and S. Koral-Kordova © 2016 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 2

DO SYSTEMS EXIST IN THE REAL WORLD?

All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.

Hillary Sillitto*
INCOSE Fellow; Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Visiting Professor, Universities of Strathclyde and Bristol

ABSTRACT
To think about systems and then to make successful improvements in them, it’s
necessary to think clearly about which aspects of our thinking refer to the “real world”
and which to various forms of mental construct.
A principal tenet of some schools of systems thinking is that systems are mental
constructs, constructs of the mind, that don't exist in the real world. This perspective is
referred to as “constructivism.” “Realists,” on the other hand, do think that systems exist
in the real world. This chapter explores the debate and suggests that both perspectives are
useful, indeed necessary.
The basic argument is as follows. Our systemic interventions are based on how we
think the world works, as described by our models of the system we think we are dealing
with. But the model is not the real world – to quote Korzybski (1931), “the map is not the
territory.” The result of our interventions depends on what we actually do (not what we
intend to do), and on how the world really works (not how we think it works).
So from a realist perspective, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between our
models of the systems and the systems themselves; and from a constructivist perspective,
to remember that the real world doesn't necessarily match the system model that we have
constructed.
It’s interesting that though the philosophical foundations of the realist and
constructivist positions seem to be completely incompatible, in practice it seems that
Copyright 2016. Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

realists and constructivists can work together quite satisfactorily in practical real world
situations – they seem to get to the same place by a different route.

Keywords: systems, realist, constructivist, system model, the modeling relationship,

correspondence between model and reality, object-process duality, interpreted world

*
E-mail: hillary.sillitto@incose.org.
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 34 Hillary Sillitto

INTRODUCTION
Bertalanffy (1969), in his introduction to “General Systems Theory,” writes: it will be
readily agreed that a galaxy, a dog, a cell and an atom are real systems; that is, entities
perceived in or inferred from observation, and existing independently of an observer... there
are [also] conceptual systems such as logic, mathematics… music… which are essentially
symbolic constructs; with abstracted systems as a subclass of the latter, i.e., conceptual
systems corresponding to reality [my emphasis]. This seems to establish a clear notion of real
systems existing in the real world, and of conceptual systems as mental constructs with a
greater or lesser degree of correspondence to the real systems.
A word or two on the Scientific Method is in order. Science seeks to develop models -
abstracted systems, in Bertalanffy’s taxonomy - which correspond to aspects of reality well
enough to allow us to predict what will happen in a given situation or in response to a given
input. The scientific method uses a systematic approach of hypothesis followed by
experiment followed by analysis of the results, and if necessary a refinement of the model, to
improve the correspondence between the “abstracted system” and the part of the real world it
represents. So the scientific method proceeds by a process of trial, error and successive
approximation from an initial perception of a phenomenon not satisfactorily explained by
current knowledge, to a new or modified theory which accounts for the newly observed
phenomenon as well as all the existing knowledge. Gauch (2003) provides a modern synthesis
of the topic and addresses some of the current debates.
In his next paragraph, Bertalanffy does admit that: the distinction [between real and
conceptual systems] is by no means as sharp and clear as it would appear. An ecosystem or a
social system is "real" enough... but these are not objects of perception or direct observation;
they are conceptual constructs. I’ll return to this issue later.
Extending this idea, in the field of psychology, Raskin (2002) writes: the constructivist
psychologies theorize about and investigate how human beings create systems for
meaningfully understanding their worlds and experiences. Thus, in Systems Thinking, the
notion of “system” is often used to denote a purely mental construct, to help humans reason
about the world, rather than to denote entities or organisations existing in the real world.
Fitting this view to von Bertalanffy’s classification, Systems Thinking is about constructing
conceptual systems to allow people to reason about some aspect of the world (By contrast,
Systems Engineering is about constructing complex artefacts – “systems,” to the realist –
that will exist in the real world).
One popular approach to systems thinking is based on systems dynamic modelling
(Meadows 2009). In system dynamic modelling, we use very simplified (some would say
over-simplified) models of stocks and flows to understand behaviours of systems with
feedback loops in them. Feedback systems don't fit well with human intuition – we are wired
to see cause-and-effect chains, not loops. System dynamic models allow people to: explain
and reason about the way real world systems do, or might, behave; learn strategies for dealing
with systems that contain feedback loops; and explore the possible unintended consequences
of well-intentioned interventions (Sterman 2000). If such models correspond well to the real
world, they have predictive utility. If the coefficients are chosen incorrectly, or if important
aspects of the real world system are omitted from the model, the predictions can be
meaningless – in a moderately complex model, you can adjust the parameters to get almost

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 Do Systems Exist in the Real World? 35

any result you want! Generally, with a model of this sort, the best we can say is “if this is a
good representation of the part of the real world we are interested in, then this is likely to
happen under these circumstances; this is the sensitivity of the results to changes in the
assumptions in the model; and this is our evidence and level of confidence that the model is a
good, or adequate, representation of the real world.”
Miller (1978) published a general theory of living systems. This sees the world as
‘concrete’ systems – defined as nonrandom accumulations of matter–energy in physical
space–time – organized at multiple levels. Systems at each level are also interacting,
interrelated parts of systems at the level above. All living systems contain twenty “critical
subsystems,” which process material, energy and information. Particularly relevant to the
discussion in this chapter, I’d observe that material and energy exist firmly in the “real
world,” while “information” is able to move between the real and conceptual worlds.
This brief and highly selective review of literature shows that the notion of “systems in
the real world” is strongly supported in some branches of the systems literature, but that there
is a significant gap to be bridged between the constructivist view of “systems as a mental
construct” and the realist assumption that “systems exist in the real world.” One noteworthy
approach to bridging the gap is offered by Hybertson (2009) who introduces the concept of
the mosaic, defined as the group of all entities, some of which are interconnected, in a defined
world, and which form the canvas on which we overlay systems concepts and especially
designations of systems. He considers that a system requires essentially two things to exist:
(1) related or interacting entities in a mosaic, and (2) a designation of the entities as a
system. Coming from a worldview concerned with “Model Oriented Systems Engineering
Science,” he is content for the designation of a system to be done by an observer, and defines
very specific “commitments” associated with the specific worldview.

SYSTEM DEFINITION
There are many different definitions of the word “system.” At the time of writing,
working groups in the International Society for Systems Science (ISSS) and the International
Council On Systems Engineering (INCOSE), working under the umbrella of the IFSR
(International Federation For Systems Research), are trying to map these definitions as a part
of a wider effort to unify the system sciences and establish a scientific foundation for Systems
Engineering.
Bertalanffy (1969) defines a system as a set of elements standing in inter-relations. This
is a very wide definition, focusing on structure, lending itself to development of mathematical
formalisms for describing systems of any sort to underpin General Systems Theory.
ISO/IEC/IEEE (2015) uses a much narrower definition, restricted at least by implication
to human-made systems: a combination of interacting elements organized to achieve one or
more stated purposes. This definition includes concepts of structure, behaviour (or at any rate
interaction), and purpose.
Since a naturally occurring system does what it does, in the spirit of POSIWID (Beer
(2002) - the purpose of a system is what it does), it can't really be said to have purpose. Any
formulation that excludes natural systems is unhelpful given the issues we now face to
integrate sustainable and resilient socio-technical-environmental systems, as discussed by

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 36 Hillary Sillitto

Sillitto (2014). A formulation that allows us to learn from and curate natural systems along
with man made systems is surely to be preferred.
So there is a third commonly used category of definitions, widely used in the systems
engineering and systems architecting literature, which includes structure and behavior but not
purpose, thereby including naturally occurring systems within their scope.
Rechtin (1991) defines a system as a set of different elements so connected or related as
to perform a unique function not performable by the elements alone, while Hitchins (2007)
defines a system as an open set of complementary, interacting parts, with properties,
capabilities and behaviours of the set emerging both from the parts and from their
interactions to synthesize a unified whole. This last definition introduces the important
concept of “a unified whole,” which links to aspects of systems philosophy and the notion of
“holism” or holistic thinking.
Influenced by these definitions, Sillitto (2014) defined a system as a collection of
interacting parts, in which the interactions result in system-level properties and behaviours
not attributable to the individual parts – which I would now paraphrase as a set of interacting
parts exhibiting properties not attributable to any of the individual parts acting alone. All of
systems engineering, and all of my own understanding of natural systems and why they are
different from natural “things,” can be derived from or accounted for in terms of this
definition. This definition seems to offer a single systems paradigm that allows us to deal
effectively with the full range of socio technical and environmental systems, and with both
man made and "discovered" systems; so this definition is used in the rest of this chapter.
It’s interesting that none of the definitions quoted in this section involves a specific
commitment to realist or constructivist perspectives.

MODELS AND “SYSTEM CONCEPTS”

When we use systems thinking to improve our understanding of the world, we build
“system models.” We have to do this because typically we are interested in phenomena that
are due not to individual observable “things,” but to interactions between them. And we may
not be sure which “things” are involved, or how they interact; what we are aware of is an
effect that can't be accounted for by any of the “things” we can see acting on their own. The
effects are observable, and our observations allow us to infer the existence of the natural
("real-world") processes that produce the effects we can observe. We then attempt to deduce
which parts of the real world are interacting to perform those processes. So our models
describe our current understanding of the real-world systems - elements and the interactions
between them - that perform the processes that result in effects we can perceive.
So in this worldview, the evidence for the existence of systems in the real world is not the
observation of “things” that we would label as “systems,” but the observation of effects
caused by processes that cannot be ascribed to single real-world “things” acting alone.
This means that what we can perceive directly in nature is not “systems” but “the effects of
systemic behaviour” (This relates to Bertalanffy’s qualification of the notion of “real”
systems mentioned earlier in this chapter). So our primary tool for establishing
correspondence between conceptual and “real” systems is not “things” but “effects.”

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 Do Systems Exist in the Real World? 37

“Effects” that cannot be attributed to individual “things” are evidence for the existence
of “real-world systems.”
According to Miller (1978), systems in the real world work due to flows and exchanges
of material, energy and information. The perceived and conceptualized world of human
thought works with information and ideas. So I suggest that information is the common
currency between the “real world” and the world of human thought.
As shown in Figure 1, we can think of a “perceived world,” which is a partial
representation of the real world composed of what we observe. The flow of information
between the real and perceived worlds is constrained by selective observation, with its
preconceptions and filters, and corrupted by noise, as described by Sillitto (2014).
This means that there may be big discrepancies between the real and perceived worlds.
We then construct models to explain or make sense of what we perceive. These exist in the
“interpreted world,” which is composed of the models we construct to make sense of our
observations.

Figure 1. Real, perceived and interpreted worlds.

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 38 Hillary Sillitto

Our system models in the interpreted world are of three kinds: “mental models,” how we
as individuals imagine the world; “shared knowledge,” representing our collective
understanding, which in the case of systems thinking results in shared “conceptual models”;
and “formal models,” models that satisfy formal rules for rigour, self-consistency and logical
completeness – typically these would be mathematical structures. This categorization of
different kinds of model is based on the Category Theory principles proposed by Lloyd
(2015), which draws in turn on the Three Worlds model of Popper (1978).
The mental, conceptual and formal models can be progressively tested and refined in line
with the Scientific Method in order to bring them into correspondence with the real world
systems they purport to represent.

“PROCESS-FIRST” THINKING
Practically every observation we can make about nature is actually to do with a process
rather than a thing. We only see “things” in the real world if they reflect or emit light (which
is a “process”). We often don't see interactions between “things” (animals eating plants and
other animals are an obvious exception...). We can usually only infer interactions between
“things” indirectly, by observing the resulting effects, and by seeing what happens differently
if we interfere with the process.
So a “system model” identifies that set of things and their interactions which, we
hypothesise, is both necessary and sufficient to account for the effects we observe. A
description of a natural system is constructed to explain a natural phenomenon - the system of
interest is deduced, or “reverse engineered,” from the effect of interest. By contrast, a man
made system is “forward engineered”1 to induce a desired effect (and, we hope, no other
undesired ones, but that's the difference between good and bad systems engineering). In both
cases, the system of interest is defined by the effect of interest.
I use the word process in the sense of something that happens – more formally, a set or
series of actions directed to some end or a natural series of changes - Free Dictionary (2015).
A process is what a system does, usually in response to stimuli. So it's dynamic. It's the
answer to “why did that effect happen?” Processes, in turn, are performed by objects or by
combinations of interacting objects, as described by Dori (2002). By associating a process in
the real world with an observable effect, we start to make the link between how the real world
works (the process), and our observation and interpretation of it (the observed effect).
If the observed effects are not attributable to any one object, they must be due to
interactions between multiple objects - hence, due to a system. So we can deduce that the
'system' needs to exist to explain the observation, even if we can't as yet identify the ‘system’.
You need to distinguish between what the system is, what it does, its observable effects,
and the observed effects. Only the last of these four categories come into human awareness.
Once the effect enters human awareness, humans can progressively infer the nature of the
observable effects, process, and ‘system’ from multiple observations of observed effects,
possibly in controlled conditions. The end result is models describing our best-guess
description of the inferred ‘system’, inferred process, and why they cause the observed effects
of the real world system.

1
The “forward/reverse engineering” terminology is due to Rechtin (1991).

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 Do Systems Exist in the Real World? 39

Figure 2. Correspondence between real and interpreted worlds.

Once we find we can predict effects, we start believing that the model and underpinning
assumptions correspond reasonably well to reality (This is how Physics has worked over
many centuries; and our technology systems wouldn't work if Physics didn't work; so as a
method it has a track record).
Figure 2 shows the correspondence between system models and the real-world systems
they aim to represent. The system model is always an approximation to the real system,
because the model is bounded whereas the real world system is open.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF SYSTEM AND SYSTEM BOUNDARY

Some systems are clearly “things,” with internal organisation and clear boundaries.
Others are more difficult to bound physically or in terms of organisation, but are rather
bound together by their association with a specific property or behaviour – for example the
parts of an ecosystem associated with the carbon or water or nitrogen cycle.
Besides clearly bounded “things,” there are at least two other important categories of
system: systems that are fleeting or transient in nature, such as a flock of geese or a social
group; and systems that are intimately embedded in their environment, such as the human
cardiovascular system, a bridge in a complex landscape, an ecosystem, the internet, or any
embedded software.
Biological systems generally do have an obvious physical boundary, chosen by evolution.
Real world instances of man made systems also tend to have an obvious physical and
“responsibility” boundary, chosen in this case by the designer.
Social (human and animal) systems also have a clear boundary – generally chosen by
their members.

BLOCKERS TO SYSTEMS UNDERSTANDING

At least three statements that are often taken to be fundamental truths, and often act as
blockers to useful discussion, need to be addressed much more carefully:

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 40 Hillary Sillitto

1. “systems have purpose” – this only applies to man made systems unless you take a
very wide view of “purpose,” hence the preference in this chapter for definitions of
“system” that don't include purpose;
2. “systems are purely mental constructs” versus “systems exist in the real world” –
addressing this issue is the main point of this chapter, which advocates a “both –
and” approach rather than “either – or”;
3. “systems have boundaries” - certainly true of engineered systems and of system
models, but I've often found it useful or necessary to defer discussion of boundaries
in systems until a systemic understanding has been gained of the situation.

Premature and too-narrow definition of boundaries seems to me to have been the primary
failure mode of many unsuccessful attempts to create or improve systems. In the past I have
argued (Sillitto 2012) that correct or appropriate choice or identification of boundary is a –
perhaps THE - key skill in systems thinking. But - if boundaries are indeed chosen by the
human observer, doesn’t that mean that they can't be a fundamental or intrinsic property of
real world systems? There can be objective criteria. In many real world systems, the boundary
encloses a region that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Hitchins (2007) characterises a
‘system’ as a region of high organisation, high energy and low entropy, that maintains this
state by consuming energy from (and thereby increasing the entropy of) its environment.

CONCLUSION
Constructivist thinking maintains that systems are purely mental constructs with no real
world existence. This short chapter presents a counter-argument, maintaining that it is often
meaningful and useful to consider that systems do exist in the real world and that objective
(observer-independent) criteria exist for identifying them. Taking the definition of a system as
a set of interacting parts exhibiting properties of the whole not attributable to any of the parts
acting on their own, evidence for existence of a system in the real world is that an observed
phenomenon cannot be accounted for by any individual objects acting alone – therefore there
must be a system, even if we can't immediately identify it. What we can identify is the
system’s “effects,” albeit in an imperfect manner because human (or equally, machine)
observation is selective, and prone to noise, error and bias. So a method analogous to the
scientific method is required to infer the process, and the system that causes the process, from
observed effects. Repeated application of the scientific method cycle of hypothesis, test,
observation and refinement allows the system model to progressively improve its
correspondence with the real world system it aims to represent.

REFERENCES
Beer (2002). What is cybernetics? Kybernetes, 31 (2), 209-19.
Bertalanffy L. V. (1969). General systems theory. Braziller.
Dori D. (2002). Object-process methodology – a holistic systems paradigm. New York, NY:
Springer.

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