System Theory

 I found that the system theory has produced a great influence in my thinking but I may not aware.

I learn the system theory when I studied the Information System course.  

It tells us to think a system first as a blackbox.

It has inputs and outputs.  The internal processes are transforming input to output.  Those processes are subsystems.

Here are slides from slideshare - https://www.slideshare.net/AshisKumarBehera1/system-theory-by-von-bertalanffy

While I learned it from the perspective of an information system analyst.  Today I learned that the discipline was actually developed by a biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy.

The above slide describes the theory by applying to analyzing the organization.  I guess that let's why I may observe the behaviors of people in the organization from the system's perspective.

One of my managers told me that I analyze too much.  The life would be difficult if you keep analyzing.  Analytically thinking is good but putting every human being into a system may be inhuman.

Each system has to interact with the environment.

I am not sure if I can agree that a system is goal-oriented.  

Sometime I found that the existence itself may be a goal for some of the systems.

System theory tell us that we can hide the details and we can also decompose a component to more details and keep drilling into it.

What it does not tell us is how to measure the interaction and how to prioritize.  

For me those come later in my life when I studied the Theory of Constraint or when I studied project and project scheduling.  Those two for me come about the same time but from different reasons.  ..