Systems Thinking Ep. 2 - Perspectives (Time, Space, & Fractals)

morning everybody David Shapiro here with episode two of the systems thinking uh series of videos today we're going to be talking about perspectives and perspectives probably doesn't mean what you think it means uh before we jump in um we'll do a quick recap of episode one so the first thing that we did was I gave you a few examples of system sneakers so there was Nikola Tesla there is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford these are the most famous systems thinkers in history some of the most famous ones um Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were likely

on the Spectrum like I am and so there's some intrinsic um you know I guess disposition towards thinking in a certain way um but Henry Ford so far as I know was neurotypical um but he understood the value of systems and studied them and so that led to the second part which is myths about intelligence certainly there are uh huge genetic factors in intelligence no matter how you measure it whether it's IQ test or multimodal or whatever um there is a there is a strong uh genetic component of intelligence now that being said the brain

is very highly plastic and a lot of intelligence comes down to things that you've practiced and things that you've learned and gained over time and so your intelligence absolutely can change over time um you know based on the books that you read the things that you practice but also like how much you sleep and how well you take care of yourself uh finally we got to lists checklists and protocols and so basically the the the heart of systems thinking is the ability to break things down into lists or procedures or checklists or whatever basically creating

structure extracting structure from something and then the the next higher order of that kind of structure is creating models or hierarchies which are just a kind of list but it's layers of abstraction for instance excuse me okay so with that recap of episode one let's move into episode two so the first kind of perspective that I want to teach you about for systems thinking is the global perspective or the global point of view this could also be called a holistic point of view so basically what you do to practice this is whatever problem you're looking

at or whatever thing you're trying to understand just take a step back look at the entire planet or the entire universe depending on what it is that you're trying to understand and so why why do this there's a few reasons one is not everything not everyone is doing things the same way and so you can avoid insular views if you take a look across the entire world and say okay how are other people approaching this how are other people thinking about this and some examples include things like healthcare economics and education so one thing occurred

to me many years ago as I was debating with people online about health care and education in other countries and most people have a very insular view they only look at their experience in education a very hyper local view so for instance here on the East Coast we are rarely aware of how Healthcare and education is done on the west coast that's in the same country in just in America let alone how how things vary in other nations now of course every now and then there will be a documentary or a News segment that will

shine a light on you know Healthcare in France or Iceland or Scandinavia or whatever excuse me but you don't need to wait until something comes along and shines light for you you can very deliberately take a step back and there are plenty of good resources you just you know say for instance you're looking at education you can just do a quick Google search like how does education work in Finland or whatever um and so the one of the points is that a variety of thought is good if for no other reason that it expands the

realm of what you know is possible and so that way you don't have to spend any time Reinventing the wheel that other people have already solved also looking at other cultures or other schools of thought from the outside is often a very effective way to see other people's gaps and then by virtue of that you become aware of your own gaps and so it can serve as a very good mirror to look uh globally or universally depending on what it is that you're you're trying to solve or think about another aspect of taking a holistic

view or a global view of things is that you can start to see an interconnectedness in all things so typically someone has to be trained to think this way so for instance if you uh are a political science major or a macroeconomics Specialist or whatever you're trained to think like okay there's inputs and outputs and there's you know diplomatic relations and that so uh that that sort of thing but you don't need a master's degree uh in order to train yourself to think this way and so for instance uh you know there's a phrase like

no man is an island and this is true for everyone on the entire planet so you know everyone knows right you look at you know made in China made in Taiwan or you know your pairs are grown in Argentina or whatever right and so the products and services that we use we are already somewhat aware of the fact that they are Global but then when you take some time to actually look into like how is it that Global grow uh food trade Works how is it that Global manufacturing works where is it that materials come

from uh so on and so forth you start to see uh that level of interconnectedness and then you add another layer so going back to the models idea there's the materials layer there's the the Commerce layer but then there's the geopolitical layer right uh that that rests on top of that or below it depending on how you think of it but geopolitics will influence things like um trade deals or uh Naval security or whatever uh and that all figures into Logistics trains and so on and so forth and so you see when you take a

big step back that everything is interconnected um now that being said we evolved to think locally you know whenever you watch uh an old-fashioned movie or read a high fantasy book and people talk about like oh you know what's beyond the valley and we the the world is so big and we are so small and we only very recently even got a complete map of the entire world we did not evolve to think globally it is not it is literally not possible for our brains to conceive of a planet worth of resources and land uh

and people there are more than eight billion people on the planet so it is not intuitive to us to think this way and it takes a lot of practice now that being said as you learn about cultures and patterns of belief and patterns of behavior as well as these different systems you can develop an intuition for it but it is not a natural intuitive in intuition um it's kind of like learning about quantum physics everything that you know about physics intuitively Newtonian physics does not apply to quantum physics and so you can develop an intuition

for quantum physics over time with practice and study another thing is because uh because the world is so big by taking a big step back you can make the big picture small because one thing that I've realized is that many people really struggle with big picture thinking and that's because it's like the tiny goldfish looking up and of course it's overwhelming right it's big and scary and overwhelming so what you do is you take a step back and you instead take the perspective of someone looking outside of the Fishbowl in because then looking at a

fishbowl is much easier to look at the whole system right if you're the fish inside the Fishbowl it's difficult to understand the system if you're outside of the Fishbowl looking in it's much easier so make the big picture small which is another way of making it more manageable in your head right because then it's like oh well if I look at if I just literally just look at this picture and I say okay well here's here's India and here's Sri Lanka and here's China and Southeast Asia right it's like it's all just I can put

my hand over it and that makes it mentally smaller which which changes the scale or the scope in my head and I'm like okay so I'm thinking about for instance China's Silk Road initiative or Belton Road initiative and it's like okay that's going to go across here I gotcha I see why they're trying to do this because it's a straight line straight from China over to the Caspian and black sea and then Mediterranean got it okay it makes sense and then here's China India and Russia ah got it that's why there's so much geopolitical tension

over here because there's three vastly different cultures with a lot of people all crammed in um close to each other so it's like just taking that it's like oh well in that case the geopolitics of this region actually is rather simple when you zoom out and you and you reduce the resolution um so yeah that's uh that is uh taking a global POV or a holistic view of uh of anything the world the problems and one thing I want to say is that like this is a general concept you can take a global POV of

any system whether it's a company or a car or whatever but this is this is one of the easiest ones especially when you're looking at social trends cultural Trends uh economic Trends religious trends that sort of thing uh this this practice is very helpful and I will often look for an image of the entire Earth in order to frame it in my head it kind of primes it to say okay let me let me look at the whole planet from from a uh you know at arm's length because if you just take a step back

and look around all I can see out my windows is my neighborhood right and it's like okay that's what I mean by we evolved to think locally but with the tools such as you know Google Earth or whatever you can zoom out and look globally okay so the second perspective to take is the long-term view so you can zoom out physically um based on space but you can also zoom out temporally based on time and so one thing that I like to do is is uh take a big step back and look at historical Trends

um look at you know not just like what happened last year or the year before but look at centuries and millennia and the reason that I say this is because uh well the best way that I've articulated it is that all of history is a countless unbroken threads of influence leading to this moment so everything that happened in ancient Egypt everything that happened in the Bronze Age everything that happened in the Iron Age everything that happened in medieval times all of those are threads of influence that led to the reality we have today um and

it's it is global right same thing for um the Islamic world uh the Far East all of history has this this cross-linking influence and so by zooming out on a temporal timeline or you know kind of shrinking the timeline so you can say okay let's look at all of the last 10 000 years of human history and that again makes it really small because then you're holding your hand out and just looking at all of time as a thumbnail and say okay that's one scale um how did we get to where we are and so

there's a few kinds of trends that you can look at religious Trends intellectual and philosophical movements artistic and cultural movements so on and so forth and this is just this is still a very a relatively small time scale so what other kinds of scales can you look at obviously there's the very short term which is seconds minutes and hours how do things change um you know in in the in the very short term and these like seconds and minutes this is what our brain will physically recognize right if something is moving too slow on the

order of inches per hour you won't physically notice it because you do not have the neural Machinery to recognize it what you'll have to do is you'll have to like leave a you know a signpost somewhere and then come back and look at it later to see how far the snail has moved for instance um then days weeks and months this is another time scale this is you know taking one step back okay how do things change over the course of days weeks months you know so for instance um many biological changes some of them

happen in seconds minutes and hours like breathing eating that sort of thing sleeping but then other things like growing and healing take days weeks and months um well actually I guess growing if you're a child takes years right years and decades and then finally the pro the whole process of Aging you know from birth to death that's on the decades to centuries um you know for those that are lucky to to make it to centenarians but then taking an even bigger step back looking at all of life all of humanity then you're talking about Millennia

eons and epochs or epochs where you can't even look at the last 10 000 years of human history in isolation why because humans didn't just come into existence at that point depending on your belief structure um but we came from mammals we came from uh the great apes we came from uh proto-humans we came from uh you know basically rodents uh or the hypo excuse me hypothetical progenitor of uh all primates all mammals today and so it's like okay if you zoom all the way out and then Zoom all the way out further to the

origin of life you know what three billion years ago single-celled organisms there are constant threads over the course of literally billions of years of influence and so by zooming all the way out to those time skills you can also get a different perspective and make things smaller and more manageable now the opposite of all that is zooming in so you can take so what we were just talking about was a holistic or top-down approach you can also take a bottom up or deconstructionist approach so one another another behavior that you can do for systems thinking

is okay so you get the global perspective right like let's say we're trying to look at um you know economic Trends in India right okay so you can look at aggregate numbers you can look at the long-term history going back you know to the British revolution or a British occupation of India and before that but then what if you what if you take take that big Global Perspective and then you zoom back in so then what do you do you might look at an individual person in India or an individual family so that's what I

mean by zooming in and kind of deconstructing it so what is the life like for you know a typical Indian person in a village or a city or you know Mumbai or New Delhi or what or wherever um and so what you can do then is by examining each component of a larger system under a microscope whether a little literal microscope or a metaphorical microscope you can challenge your assumptions and beliefs that you arrived at based on that zoomed out perspective and so then what you do is you start to update your mental model by

saying okay here's all the tiny components that go into this kind of thing and then as as you go you kind of pick apart the system bit by bit because all systems are made of components and so then as you understand the components of a system you can test those components in isolation if possible it's usually not fully possible because again no man is an island but what you can do is you can you can by zooming in you can look at the interactions linkages and boundaries of the components inside the system so for instance

if you're trying to look at National Trends some of those interactions and linkages and boundaries are going to be the family boundary or the company boundary or the municipal boundary right so by looking at those boundaries many of which are nested so you go back to the models and lists right it's a a hierarchy right a nested hierarchy of you know the smallest unit is the individual the next unit up is probably the family next unit up might be extended family or community so on and so forth and so then you look at the the

internal interactions of those units but then you also look at the interactions between those units at different layers and different scales this allows you to and also if you think of a micro microscope or a telescope you can zoom out you can zoom in you can kind of pan around that sort of thing and that allows you to compare the micro to the macro so that you can start to create that hierarchy in your mind that mental model in your mind that has those layers of abstractions and so that's why I started episode one with

lists and models and hierarchies because what you're doing in your mind if you practice zooming in and zooming out you're intuitively building up a a hierarchy in your head and you can explicitly write it down as well um now finally there are uh there are two kinds of things that you can look for behaviors system behaviors so there's aggregate behaviors so aggregate behaviors is like okay what is the net effect what is the final result of you know a billion people doing X Y or Z right and so the aggregate effect of say for instance

food consumption you can say okay you know a billion people produce you know x million uh tons of carbon per day or whatever right so that's an aggregate um result or aggregate measurement and then there's emergent behaviors and so emergent behaviors are the behaviors that you can observe when you zoom out but have no apparent cause when you zoom in and so the most common thing for this is swarm Behavior so if you watch just watch just a single ant or a single B you're not going to be able to understand their swarming behavior until

you look at the whole Colony or the whole Hive right and the same thing is true of people right uh you know the the emergent behavior of societies of of Nations is not going to be obvious from an individual so for instance military actions if you ask an individual of Any Nation what is the military going to do what what you know would you join the military would you go kill someone so on and so forth the answer is generally going to be no people by and large are not belligerent and yet the emergent behavior

of a whole nation is you'll have you know a standing army of for even small Nations tens of thousands hundreds of thousands for larger Nations for the largest nations you'll have a standing army of over a million or more and then you'll expend tremendous amounts of resources on weapons Expeditions and ultimately uh destruction which these are emergent behaviors that are not obvious by looking at the individual humans that make up a society and so when uh when people like Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as Society there's only individuals and families that was

a total lie um the societies and Nations and stuff absolutely are unique entities that have those emergent behaviors that are that are not going to be obviously um driven by any individual single Behavior so by zooming in you can say okay where's the disconnect right so in the case of ants and and bees and swarms or humans and military actions for instance you can say okay how do you get from that zoomed out thing where you know the the United States Department of Defense has three to four million employees but then on an individual scale

no single person really wants to go to another Nation just to kill people some people do but they are an extreme minority most people just want to get by right and so then you say okay what are the steps that link those behaviors and what are the individual behaviors that link up to those Aggregate and emergent um results okay so in terms of thinking of models right we talked about models in the first episode as you know layers of abstraction or hierarchies this is actually one of the most intuitive ways to think about complex systems

and that is to think about every complex system as a unique life form so all complex systems have lifelike characteristics there's inputs there's outputs there's needs reactions and internal mechanisms and in fact all organisms are themselves complex systems the human body is one of the most complex systems in the entire universe but we're used to it because we have one which makes it easy and intuitive for us to say oh well what if we think of a complex system as an organism right because again just by looking at your skin cells you're not going to

be able to infer the emergent behavior of a human right you can't look at you know someone's cuticles right under a microscope and say ah yes this is a criminal right or or whatever um so again that that difference in scale but also just by using this as a um as a metaphor so computers as as a former I.T professional computers are a great example of this so whether you're talking about an individual computer like your phone or large computer systems like giant Cloud systems like what I used to work on I would always think

of them as organisms right they have their needs there's particular care and feeding and so for instance when I would make a change to the storage network of my systems and the one of the largest computer systems I was responsible for was like two to three petabytes of data right so there's a huge amount of data and there's backups there's all kinds of processes going on there's nested processes there's processes on a small scale there's network-wide processes and so what I realized is that when I thought about the computer systems that I was responsible for

as an organism gigantic organisms like okay I made a change and now it's going to take some time for that change to circulate it's going to take some time for that that change to digest and so for instance think about adding a vaccine to a human right you inject the vaccine but it can take two weeks or longer before the that person is inoculated against whatever problem there was and the same thing is true of computer systems so say for instance you deploy a security patch right well it doesn't go out immediately it has to

wait for a reboot cycle and then you don't reboot everything at once you know there's there's the this this kind of soaking time meanwhile there's all kinds of ongoing lifelike processes like backups and databases and queries and stuff um all going on all at the same time in parallel massively parallel just like a human body because it's not like you know your heart beats and then your kidney pumps and then your liver does something no all of your organs are working in parallel along with your brain right you're digesting you're thinking you're breathing you're doing

all these things all at once all the time and so computer systems are a a very accessible way of thinking about something as being alive or lifelike now every complex system has lifelike characteristics whether it's economics education or legal and political systems right Nations cities states you know you can say like okay well an individual in a nation is like a skin cell on a on a body right uh it's it's more metaphorical than analogous but I think you get my meaning companies businesses and organizations of all kinds are like this where the organs of

that are going to be um the individual officers or the or the groups within those companies um and then finally um internet social media and other communities are also very much like living organisms where there's going to be emergent behaviors that are not going to be obvious from the individual participants and so finally by looking at these things you say okay well how does this organism behave right you look at a gorilla and you say okay well you know they beat their chest and they have they form these social groups and so on how does

that differ from a chameleon right a lizard here and why you know you can look at differences of intelligence and other components and stuff and then you say okay well what does this organism need to thrive and you can have that same mentality and look at Nations communities corporations all of the above you say what does this organism what does this entity need in order to thrive and so that uh wraps up uh thinking the the organic or the organism model of systems thinking and then finally the last one that I want to leave you

with today is thinking in fractals so this is going to be the most abstract lesson so far now for those that you're who are not familiar a fractal is a mathematical pattern that Zooms in or out to infinite no matter how much you zoom into a fractal there's going to be more detail to see and also no matter how much you zoom out so there's an infinite amount of zoom in or out and you can pan across the whole thing and the no matter how close you look there's always going to be more detail but

what can happen is as you zoom out you're going to notice patterns that you couldn't see when you're too zoomed in likewise when you zoom in you're going to discover new patterns that are nested within larger patterns and so by looking for patterns at different scales and this is different time scales different physical scales emotional scales whatever biological skills by learning to think in terms of fractals of okay what are the patterns at this scale and how do they fit into the larger pattern because again everything is interconnected there's no actual boundaries in this there

are apparent boundaries right where you see a pattern right you see this like kind of seahorse looking pattern and then there's a gap right and but that is that is a pattern or that is a boundary that you notice and imagine is there but the closer you look the more you realize there actually isn't any boundaries there's just the apparent boundaries based on contrast and so when you look for patterns at different scales you're going to find interactions recursions and parallels so the interactions are like okay it almost looks like you know these patterns kind

of push against these other ones and then there's this like anti-affinity then in other cases you're going to see these patterns where they almost seem to draw in right where this one it kind of collapses and spirals in where you have this this uh condensation and that's even more intense here where the pattern actually is impulsive rather than explosive and then you'll then here you see almost a very rigid kind of pattern where it's like okay there's almost like a rule that says like you cannot infiltrate this circle why is that um but that's what

I mean by noticing those parallels those recursions and interactions um and then what you can do is you can look for the underlying rules the commonality that underpins these systems and then one thing I want to point out is you probably already know this but fractals appear everywhere in nature your heartbeat follows a fractal pattern because the way that the nerve signals propagate across your heart and it's also the way that your body keeps time um so there's several there's again there's several layers of abstraction because there's the um the brain stem which helps monitor

and and manage the whole body but then there's the way that the signals propagate down your vagus nerve and uh and plenty of other complex interactions that all result in controlling your heart rate uh many plants have fractal patterns you'll see this most common in like cauliflower and other flowers um coastlines the coastline Paradox have a fractal nature where depending on how far in you Zoomer out it's actually almost impossible to measure the actual length of a coastline crystals all crystals but especially snowflakes follow fractal patterns and then finally lightning Rivers clouds and mountains all

have aspects of of fractal geometry in them and so it's like well why you know is there is there math behind it and so this gets to the question of is math just a description for the universe or is math the actual operating system of the universe and there's a lot of debate around this so I'm not going to make any claims one way or the other but I will point out that understanding the mathematical patterns behind everything and how there's very complex interactions is one of the most important keys to systems thinking so as

a recap before we close this video um there were kind of five different um methods or techniques to systems thinking that I talked about first is zooming out to take a Global Perspective this is one of my favorite activities to do um and it's how I came to understand things like neoliberalism and the and the and the um the status quo of Economics um the second thing is taking the same Long View but from a timeline perspective and this is how I came to my understanding of post nihilism by looking at the the succession of

events of intellectual religious spiritual and cultural events and Trends I said oh where we're at is the nihilistic crisis because that is the train wreck that has been unfolding for the last few hundred years and so what therefore what we need is post nihilism and I just said I just listed it out again going for that list I said here's the sequence of events and here is the next logical event in that pattern basically number three is zooming in so you can zoom in on a temporal scale you can zoom in on a physical scale

so on and so forth it's the same thing as zooming out just in the opposite direction uh number four is looking at things like organ as organisms and so if you say like okay if you had to uh characterize America as an organism how does this organism behave or if you had to characterize a company as an organism how does that organism behave and what does it need what what makes those organisms Thrive and then finally number five um understanding the fractal nature of everything in nature uh no ing that math is either a way

to describe what's happening or it's actually driving what's happening again I'm not going to make a a an assertion one way or another but there is a very powerful parallel between fractal patterns um in pure math and then the patterns that we see emerging in nature and so if you practice all of these this is going to get you one step closer to very much being a systems thinker like myself or those three uh inventors that I mentioned at the beginning of the video so with all that said thank you for watching this has been

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