I’ve been thinking a lot about the design of systems recently, and have been digging a into the soft systems thinking work done by people like Checkland and Wilson.

One of my takeaways from their work is that you can engage in the design of a system (it may appear to be the whole system from your position in the ecosystem), but you rarely design a system from scratch – they almost always pre-exist, and their structures are initially defined through emergence rather then design.

What I find interesting from their (C & W’s) perspective is that when you engage in system design (action learning in their vocabulary), you actually become part of the system yourself, and your involvement changes the system whether it’s through action or inaction.

Maybe we design our actions in systems instead of designing objects?