Systems Principles: Openness, Purposefulness and Multidimensionality

Book: Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity Author: Jamshid Gharajedaghi ISBN: 978-0-7506-7973-2

This is post 3 of 23 in the Systems Thinking series.

Previous: How the Game Is Evolving

Chapter 2 is where Gharajedaghi lays out the actual building blocks of systems thinking. Five principles. Five ideas that, once you get them, change how you see pretty much everything. This post covers the first three: openness, purposefulness, and multidimensionality.

The chapter opens with a sharp observation. We’ve been using one language to understand the world: analytical science. It worked well for a while. But when you use only one lens, you miss things. You see parts but not wholes. You see causes but not patterns.

We need a new language. A systems language. These five principles are its alphabet.

Openness: Nothing Exists in a Vacuum

Here’s the first principle, and it sounds obvious until you really think about it. Open systems can only be understood in the context of their environment.

You can’t understand why a company is failing by looking only at what happens inside the company. You can’t understand why a person acts a certain way without understanding their culture, their relationships, their situation. Everything depends on everything else.

But that sounds overwhelming, right? If everything is connected, where do you even start?

Gharajedaghi says the first breakthrough was sorting the “everything” into two buckets. Things you can control, and things you can’t. The stuff you can control is your system. The stuff you can’t is your environment. And the line between them? That’s your system boundary. It’s not fixed. It’s not objective. It depends on who you are and what power you have.

Then came the second idea: the stuff you can’t control is usually pretty predictable. Weather patterns, market cycles, demographic trends. You can’t change them, but you can see them coming. So the strategy became predict and prepare. Forecast what’s going to happen, then get ready for it.

This worked great. Entire industries were built around prediction models. Nobel Prizes were handed out.

And then the predictions stopped working.

Turns out there’s a third category that everyone missed. Variables you can’t fully control but you can influence. Your customers, your suppliers, your boss, your own team members. You don’t control what they do. But you can nudge them.

Here’s the interesting twist. The more you can influence something, the less predictable it becomes. Think about it. If your marketing actually works on customers, their behavior gets harder to forecast. Gharajedaghi puts it perfectly: “If a rain dance had any influence on the weather, we would not be able to predict the weather.”

This leads to his definition of leadership that I really like. Leadership is the ability to influence those you cannot control. It’s not about managing down. It’s about managing up and outward.

One more thing about openness. Living systems have an internal code. DNA for biological organisms. Culture for organizations. Left alone, that code keeps reproducing the same patterns. An organization will keep doing what it’s always done unless something disrupts its cultural DNA.

Purposefulness: Why People Do What They Do

The second principle is about understanding purpose. And Gharajedaghi makes a sharp distinction here between information, knowledge, and understanding.

Information tells you what is happening. Knowledge tells you how it works. Understanding tells you why it happens.

Most organizations stop at information or knowledge. They know what their customers buy and how they buy it. But they don’t understand why. And the why is where the real insight lives.

So why do people do what they do? Gharajedaghi says choice has three dimensions: rational, emotional, and cultural.

Rational choice is about self-interest. But here’s the key. It’s the decisionmaker’s perceived self-interest, not what an outside observer thinks is rational. He shares a great story from his work with the Ford Foundation in India. Americans were trying to teach birth control and couldn’t understand why Indian families kept having kids despite getting free contraceptives and a transistor radio as a reward.

“Indians are irrational,” the project manager said.

But Russ Ackoff, Gharajedaghi’s mentor, pushed back. If a Brazilian woman can have 42 children, why do Indian families average only 4.6? They clearly know how to limit births. They’re just choosing not to.

The reason? No social security. No retirement system. Three sons was the retirement plan. Statistically, you need an average of 4.6 children to get three sons. So families who had three sons stopped having kids. They were being completely rational. The Ford Foundation was solving the wrong problem.

That story stuck with me because it shows up everywhere. When you think someone is being irrational, you probably just don’t understand their rationale.

Emotional choice is about excitement and challenge. Gharajedaghi tested this with a chess experiment. Students could play a computer at nine difficulty levels, winning a dollar per win and losing a dollar per loss. Every student started at the easiest level. But after winning a few bucks, they all moved harder. By the end, most were at level five or six, even though they were losing money.

People don’t just want to win. They want to be challenged. Setting easy goals is boring. This explains why corporate life feels meaningless for so many people.

Cultural choice is the sneaky one. Culture sets the default values. Just like a programming language fills in default parameters when you don’t specify them, culture fills in decisions when people don’t actively choose. And most of the time, people don’t even realize they have a choice. They just follow the defaults.

Gharajedaghi also breaks down three types of system behavior. Reactive systems respond automatically, like a thermostat. Goal-seeking systems can choose how to reach a fixed goal, like an animal hunting for food. But purposeful systems can choose both the means and the ends. They can change what they’re after, not just how they get there.

That’s free will. That’s what makes humans fundamentally different from machines.

Multidimensionality: Stop Thinking in Either/Or

This is the principle that might change how you think about disagreements forever.

We love opposites. Security vs. freedom. Order vs. complexity. Tradition vs. progress. Individual vs. collective. And we treat these as zero-sum games. More of one means less of the other.

Gharajedaghi says this is a fallacy. And it shows up in two forms.

The first is the dichotomy. X or Not-X. Right or wrong. Pick a side. The loser gets eliminated. This is an “or” relationship. Win/lose.

The second is the continuum. Okay, maybe it’s not black and white. Maybe there are shades of gray. So we compromise. We find a middle point between two extremes. But compromise is unstable. It shifts whenever the power balance changes. And nobody is really happy with it.

Here’s the systems thinking alternative: multidimensionality. Instead of putting opposing ideas on the same line, put them on separate dimensions. Security and freedom aren’t opposites on a spectrum. They’re two independent axes. You can have high security AND high freedom. You can have low security AND low freedom. They’re not competing. They’re complementary.

Think about freedom, justice, and security. You can’t be free if you’re not secure. You won’t be secure if you’re not free. Justice without freedom is tyranny. Freedom without justice is anarchy. They’re not three separate things fighting for space. They’re three dimensions of the same thing.

This reframing is powerful. Every time you hear someone say “we have to choose between A and B,” ask yourself: what if A and B are separate dimensions? What if we can have both?

The old way says: production vs. distribution, individual rights vs. collective good, environment vs. economy. Pick one.

The systems way says: both can increase together. Both can decrease together. The trick is finding designs where they reinforce each other instead of fighting.

Why These Three Principles Matter Together

Openness tells you that nothing exists in isolation. You have to look at the whole picture, including the environment.

Purposefulness tells you that the actors in that picture have real choices. And those choices are driven by a mix of rational self-interest, emotional excitement, and cultural defaults.

Multidimensionality tells you to stop framing everything as trade-offs. The most interesting solutions come from treating opposing forces as complementary dimensions rather than competitors.

These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re tools for seeing the world differently. And once you see through this lens, the old either/or debates start looking pretty limited.

Next up: the final two principles, emergent properties and counterintuitiveness. That’s where things get really interesting.

Next: Systems Principles - Emergent Properties and Counterintuitiveness