Bulldozer00's Blog

Assume that you’re given a bounded “System Of Interest” (SOI) you desperately want to understand. Cuz it’s a ‘nuther whole can of worms, please suspend “reality” for a moment and fuggedaboud who defined the SOI boundaries and plopped it onto your lap to study.

So, where and how do you start attacking the task at hand? Being a member of a western, logical, science-revering culture, you’ll most likely take the analysis path as depicted in the left side of the figure below. You’d try to discern what the SOI’s elemental parts are (forming your own arbitrary part-boundaries, of course) and how each of the parts behaves independently of the others. After performing due diligence at the parts level, you’d aggregate the fragmented part-behaviors together into one grand theory of operation and voila….. you’re done! Because the reductionist approach doesn’t explore the why of the SOI, you’d  most likely be wrong. If one or more of the system “parts” is self-purposeful, uh, like people, you’d most likely be 100% wrong.

A complementary approach to understanding a SOI concerns formulating the why of the system – first. As the right-side path in the above figure conveys, the synthesis approach to understanding starts with the exploration of the super-system that contains the SOI. Upon gaining an understanding of the operational context of the SOI within its parent system (the why), the what and the how of the SOI’s parts can be determined with greater accuracy and insight.

The figure below illustrates side-by-side state machine models of the two approaches toward system understanding. Which one best represents the way you operate?