What is a System?

If sustainability is a state of a system, the natural question is: what exactly is a "system"? The answer is both simpler and stranger than most people expect.

A system is a dynamic set of actors, relations, objects, and things, and all their interconnections. A city, a company, a community, or society as a whole. All of the "hardware" and "software" combined. Such a system "lives" in reality, like a living organism: it exists in time and space, constantly moving, changing, interacting, and shifting.

Here is the strange part: what is and is not a system is defined by us. It is not a scientific truth like gravity. It is a theoretical device we use to think about the world in a specific way. We "create" a system by defining its boundaries, which determine where the system stops and other systems, or the "rest of the universe," begin.

We do this because always looking at everything in the universe as one big connected system may be more truthful, but it is also debilitating. You cannot act on everything at once. So we draw a boundary, usually a step higher than the challenge we are looking at. When looking at creating a building or a social service, we investigate the city it will be in as the system, or perhaps the region, or the country.

By defining a boundary, we essentially lift the focus area out of the complex network of things and look at it as if it were a separate entity, yet connected to everything else in a more abstract sense. Cities, an event, a region, our planet: all can be seen as a system. The system does not always need to be defined carefully, especially in the beginning.

The Integrated Approach

To truly investigate a system, we need to look at it in its entirety. In order to look at all "sides" properly, we investigate it across all dimensions, scales, and in the full spectrum. Doing this is called the "integrated" approach.

This is where sustainability science departs from traditional analysis. Most fields examine systems through a single lens: economics, ecology, engineering, sociology. The integrated approach insists that you look through all of them simultaneously. Not because it is easy, but because looking through one lens will always blind you to the effects visible through the others.

Think of it this way. You can look at reality as a connection of interconnected systems: people systems, societal systems, economic systems. The question is how they form the super-organism that is the anthill of humanity. Systems thinking allows you to see yourself not just as an individual but as a cell of a larger organism. You have a role, a function, value to bring. And the organism has behaviors that cannot be explained by looking at any single cell.

Systems are defined and separated by their system boundary. They are a collection of agents and their relations (the network), that operate in time, space, and context, defined by their boundary.

The snowball effect of systems thinking is the ability to, almost like acupuncture, pinprick relatively small things and achieve very great results. This is one of the only antidotes we have to the exponential damage we are doing.