Systems Principles: Emergent Properties and Counterintuitiveness
This is post 4 of 23 in a series on “Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity” by Jamshid Gharajedaghi (ISBN 978-0-7506-7973-2).
Previous: Systems Principles - Openness and Purposefulness
We covered openness and purposefulness last time. Now we get into three more systems principles: plurality, emergent properties, and counterintuitiveness. These are the ideas that made me stop and re-read paragraphs. They hit different.
Plurality: There’s More Than One Way
Plurality is a simple idea with big consequences. It says that a system can have multiple functions, multiple structures, and multiple processes. Not just one of each.
Think about a car. Its obvious function is transportation. But it also works as a status symbol. An investor looks at a car company and sees a money-making machine. A union leader sees a job-producing system. An entrepreneur sees a lifetime challenge. Same company, totally different functions depending on who’s looking.
And here’s where Gharajedaghi gets sharp. He says that when organizations focus on just one function and ignore the rest, you get “successful operations but dead patients.” Ouch.
Structure Isn’t Fixed
We tend to think of structure as something solid. Like, this is how things are arranged, and that’s that. But social systems don’t work like that. People form different relationships with each other all the time. They cooperate on some things, compete on others, and fight about the rest. All at the same time.
Members of a group learn and change. The result is an interactive network that keeps recreating itself. That’s plurality of structure. It’s uncomfortable because we like to think structure is stable. But in any real organization, the actual structure shifts constantly.
Process: Many Roads, Same Destination (Or Not)
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Classical thinking says: same starting conditions, same results. Gharajedaghi introduces two concepts that blow this up.
Equifinality means you can reach the same end state through completely different paths. Think about it. Two companies can end up equally successful through totally different strategies.
Multifinality is the opposite. Same starting conditions can lead to completely different outcomes. The process matters more than where you started. This is huge. It means you can’t just copy someone else’s starting conditions and expect their results.
Emergent Properties: The Whole Does Things the Parts Can’t
This section is the highlight of the chapter for me.
Gharajedaghi starts with a beautiful example. “I can love, but none of my parts can love. If you take me apart, the phenomenon of love will be lost.”
That’s an emergent property. It belongs to the whole system, not to any individual part. You can’t find it by breaking things down. And you can’t measure it directly with your five senses. Love doesn’t have a color, a sound, or a smell.
He calls these “type II properties” and separates them from regular properties like weight (type I). Type I properties are straightforward. You can measure them. They belong to individual parts. Type II properties only exist because of interactions between parts.
Success Is an Emergent Property
Here’s the part that stuck with me most. If success is an emergent property, then it’s about managing interactions, not just individual actions.
Gharajedaghi uses a sports analogy that lands perfectly. An all-star team is not necessarily the best team in the league. It might even lose to an average team. What makes a winning team isn’t just the quality of the players. It’s the quality of the interactions between them.
He backs this up with a real example. The New Orleans Saints once had four defensive players in the Pro Bowl. But they didn’t have the best defense in the league. That same year, the Dallas Cowboys won the Super Bowl without a single defensive player in the Pro Bowl. The Cowboys’ defense worked better as a whole because the players fit together.
This applies directly to organizations. When the parts are compatible and reinforce each other, you get a force that’s way bigger than the sum of separate parts. When they’re incompatible, you get less than what each part could produce on its own.
You Can’t Fake Emergent Properties (Well, People Try)
Gharajedaghi makes a funny observation here. Since most important human qualities are emergent properties, “the art of faking has been the major preoccupation of behavioral sciences in recent decades.” Remember when people thought wearing a red tie would make them look powerful? That’s trying to fake an emergent property.
The same thing happens with organizations. Growth gets used as a measure of success. But growing by making bad acquisitions isn’t real success. As Gharajedaghi puts it: “two turkeys will not make an eagle.”
To avoid getting fooled, you need to measure more than one thing. He suggests EVA (economic value added) as a better measure because it combines growth with actual value creation.
Counterintuitiveness: Good Intentions, Bad Results
This is the section that makes you question everything. Counterintuitiveness means that actions designed to produce a desired outcome may actually generate the opposite result.
The classic line: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Gharajedaghi gives a sharp example with welfare systems. Expanding welfare to reduce poverty can actually increase it. More welfare needs more money, which means higher taxes. Higher taxes push wealthy people and businesses out of the region, which shrinks the tax base. Meanwhile, better welfare attracts more people who need it. And it might reduce the incentive to work. More costs, less revenue. The exact opposite of what was intended.
Why This Happens
Four things make systems counterintuitive:
- Cause and effect are separated in time and space. Something happening now might show its effect somewhere else, much later.
- Cause and effect can swap roles. They display circular relationships.
- One event can have multiple effects. And the importance of each effect can shift over time.
- The original cause can be replaced. Removing it won’t necessarily remove the effect.
That last one is critical. How many times have you seen people trying to fix a problem by removing its original cause, only to find the problem keeps going? The system has moved on. New variables have taken over.
The Steve Jobs Story
Gharajedaghi retells an interesting bit of tech history. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 to build the NeXT computer. It was beautiful. Better engineering, better interface, better operating system. By most technical measures, it was superior to everything else.
But while Jobs was perfecting his machine, Windows came along. Windows wasn’t as good as Mac, let alone NeXT. But it was cheap. And it worked on inexpensive PCs that were everywhere.
NeXT never took off. The market didn’t choose the best product. It chose the most compatible one. As Gharajedaghi writes: “Market economies, like democracies, do not usually select the best solutions. They choose the most compatible, satisfying solution.”
Being ahead of your time is sometimes worse than falling behind.
The Boiling Frog
There’s a famous analogy here. Drop a frog in boiling water and it jumps out. Put it in warm water and heat it slowly, and it boils to death. Social systems do the same thing. Gradual adaptation to a worsening environment can kill you.
Gharajedaghi calls this the “Pan Am Syndrome.” Organizations bleed to death by adapting to slow, barely noticeable decline. Always doing too little, too late. By the time they realize how bad things are, they’ve already lost the strength to respond.
The scary part? Sudden change is actually less dangerous than gradual decline. With sudden change, you still have your full strength to fight back.
What I Take From This
Three big ideas from this section. First, you can’t understand a system by breaking it apart. The most important properties only exist at the whole-system level. Second, good intentions aren’t enough. You need to model how the system actually works, including time delays and feedback loops. Third, success isn’t something you achieve once. It’s an ongoing process that needs constant reproduction.
That last point is worth sitting with. Love, happiness, success. None of them are permanent states. They’re all being generated in real time by ongoing interactions. Stop the process and the property disappears.
Next: Systems Dimensions - Throughput, Membership, and Conflict