For a long time, I harbored the suspicion that systems thinkers were just dressing up banal ideas with specialized vocabulary. Then the phrase “The purpose of a system is what it does” started trending on X, which struck me as a pithy expression of something that’s too easily forgotten. I grew a little more charitable and, ready to be disabused of my bias against systems thinking, I read John Gall’s Systemantics: The Systems Bible to try to understand more about what this loose field of interdisciplinary thinkers had to offer our collective cognitive toolkit.
I was drawn to Gall’s book over others in part because it advertised itself as a “beginner’s guide to systems.” After a quick perusal, I felt reasonably sure that I wasn’t going to be thrown in the deep end. This feeling remained intact through the four (!!!) introductions, one of which sees Gall explaining that his take on systems thinking is different from the academic sort in that it’s more “a form of Guerilla Theater” that favors “pragmatic insights” over watertight formalism. My feeling of ease turned out to be short-lived, though. Little did I know when I started it that the book’s depth doesn’t manifest in exotic equations but in the serpentine network of laws, corollaries, and addendums unveiled in quick succession.
But let me start out with one of the book’s big successes, which is providing a concise definition of what a system is. Part of my hangup about systems thinking was that it seemed like a system could be anything at all. Gall, though, describes systems as organizations with their own goals that are orthogonal or even antagonistic to the purpose for which the system was developed. He writes that we create systems to solve apparently simple problems, but the systems end up creating a whole microcosm with its own independent demands. In response to the need to remove garbage from our cities, for example, systems have to be set up that deal with all sorts of things apparently unrelated to garbage, like union negotiations, weather, vehicle maintenance, local politics, oil prices, and so on. These sorts of goals tend to grow until they overshadow the purported objective of the organization. In the example of garbage collection, Gall writes that the system’s internal demands could spill over onto consumers in the form of higher fees, or too-strictly enforced regulations on how trash is sorted and packaged. With enough dysfunction, consumers just start dumping their trash on the side of the road, defeating the entire purpose of a garbage collection system.
Using Gall’s framework, certain perversities come into focus. Politicians begin planning their reelection campaigns as soon as they’re in office. Environmental non-profits fight against renewable energy. An AI company creates an image generator that’s so hellbent on diverse representation that it’s useless. In each of these cases, internal demands have caused the system to lose sight of what problems they were created to solve.
The rest of Systemantics can be read as working out the implications of this fundamental insight about systems. One of my favorite chapters is about the life cycle of systems. A given system will organize itself around being able to provide a specific response to a problem. When the problem changes, the system’s inertia prevents it from reorganizing to provide a more appropriate response or sometimes from even recognizing that the problem has changed. This results in the old maxim that “Armies prepare to fight their last war, rather than their next war.” Gall takes this insight a step farther by recognizing that systemic sclerosis can be measured by its planning processes: “PERFECTION OF PLANNING IS A SYMPTOM OF DECAY” (caps lock his). That is, the only way to arrive at a perfect plan is by synchronizing everyone in the system. It’s impossible to synchronize to the future, though, since there are too many unknowns. Thus, the only way to create a perfect plan is by planning for the past, and a willingness to do so indicates that the system has become too inwardly-focused to recognize its problems.
This level of delusion is only available to systems above a certain size. Big systems grow from small systems, but have to change their behavior as they grow. This means that internal demands don’t scale linearly with size. They tend instead to grow in proportion of the number of possible connections within the company and between the company and its external partners — that is, almost exponentially. Much of the system becomes at least nominally committed to reducing transaction costs, but of course these parts of the system have their own transaction costs that must be imposed on others as forms, processes, committees, and so on.
At a certain level of complexity, a system takes on some of the characteristics of a biological organism. Gall talks particularly about systems’ sense organs and how the messages within systems tend to lose their correspondence with reality over time. The end state of this senescence is the system’s creation of its own reality — a world in which “IF IT ISN’T OFFICIAL, IT HASN’T HAPPENED.” At this point, the metaphor of a body breaks down, and the system’s poorly connected fragments end up responding to external stimuli. When talking to a pet, Gall writes:
The command, ‘Here, Spot!’ can reliably be counted on to produce not merely an approach response of the four legs, but also appropriate accommodative reactions of head, ears, tail, and body. The whole dog hears and responds. […] Not so with Systems. Our message may have been seen by only one person in only one department, and that person may not have understood it. The System-as-such may be totally ignorant of the receipt of the message, let alone its content, and whatever response organs the System might have may remain totally unactivated.
Noah Smith memorably wrote about this distinction between small, responsive systems with functional sense organs and their larger, duller counterparts by saying, “The business of small business is business. The business of big business is whatever it wants.”
I don’t know how well I’ve captured it, but Gall is an exceptionally quirky writer. There’s the matter of the four introductions, but he also has a habit of slipping into a kind of psuedo-German capitalization of certain phrases:
Perhaps your children are reluctant to Brush Their Teeth before going to bed. You begin reading the Bedtime Story to them while they are still Brushing Their Teeth. Soon they are rushing to Brush Their Teeth after supper, because that’s when the Bedtime Story begins. You are using the Bedtime Story as a slingshot (like Jupiter) to speed them through Brushing Their Teeth and into bed.
Echoes of Gertrude Stein there.
What I think deserves a closer look is how Gall lays out the axioms of system behavior that make up the book’s structure. They come quickly and in great abundance, each in capital letters and many with alternate phrasings, corollaries, and examples of the axioms’ converses. Then they’re referred to by clever acronyms that I could never quite remember without referring back to the law’s first instance. For example, Gall calls the insight above about echo chambers within systems the “Fundamental Law of Administrative Workings” or the F.L.A.W. But there’s also F.P.F.P (“Fully Prepared For the Past”, as in “ready to fight the last war”), the F.I.T. (“Functional Indeterminacy Theorem”), the F.F.T. (“Fundamental Failure Theorem”), and the B.I.T. (“Basic Information Theorem”), not to mention five Meta-Strategies that are referred to by number. Suffice it to say, it’s a lot to keep track of.
The difficulty of working with Gall’s axioms makes me think that his quirky writing style isn’t for its own sake, but signals that there’s a game afoot. On a certain level, the axioms aren’t there to be used in and of themselves. They’re there to demonstrate what it’s like to be in a system: the swiftly presented rules, the opaque names, the endless addenda, the self-reference — this is what it’s like to be embedded in a system that can’t see outside of its own workings. It’s like Gall’s way of saying, “Go and do otherwise.”
It makes me think of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, where she distilled the messages of conventional wisdom to a set of frank aphorisms and displayed them like advertisements on billboards, theater marquees, and in stadiums. One by one, you can consume them like slightly too honest fortune cookies. But together, their contradictions start to show. Which of the following of her Truisms are we really to believe:
an elite is inevitable
class structure is as artificial as plastic
exceptional people deserve special concessions
I’d argue that the statements aren’t there to be believed or disbelieved, but to present a facade of interpretability. That is, the Truisms are meant to tempt readers with the possibility of some grand wisdom that, if you could just get your mind around it… But that possibility is always withdrawn by the next contradiction in a dance of transparency and obfuscation.
We see a similar theme in Kafka’s “The Trial”, where we find the famous line, “correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive.” That is, hope of intelligibility can be taken away at any moment, even when you’re reasonably confident that you understand a thing. Without offering the hope of intelligibility, a system couldn’t get people to buy into it; without having the power to take away that hope of intelligibility, a system would be too vulnerable to individuals’ desires.
It’s the same with Systemantics. The book is a cat and mouse game where you can never quite grasp the system in total, but only one part at a time. Gall is very happy to dangle the idea that you can understand, though, if only you’d try a little harder. His motivation isn’t sadism, but instead wanting to demonstrate how systems create the conditions of their dysfunction by wearing down your critical faculties. If we can see Gall’s pedagogical purpose through our annoyance, he’s helped us achieve something we can’t often do in our daily lives. After all, operating within a system isn’t always as low stakes as reading a book. We depend on systems for our careers, our finances, our safety and hope that we’re blessed with functional ones — so much so, that when we find a system with can live with, we often learn to just not see the parts that we can’t understand (Holzer again: “disorganization is a kind of anesthesia”).
This pedagogical purpose — teaching the reader to see like a system — accounts for some of the absolutely rancid opinions Gall expresses throughout the book. Between complaining about self-service gas stations and the fact that mental illnesses are treated as diseases, Gall sets his sights on nuclear power. Multiple times. Here’s a taste:
For our own part, we are partial to the Horrible Example represented by Nuclear Power Plants, which, after a useful life of perhaps thirty to fifty years, must then be sealed off and guarded for five hundred thousand years, give or take a few millennia, while their radioactive poisons decay.
I find it hard to believe that someone who professes interest in systems would fail to see the costs of not adopting nuclear power. That by not using nuclear power, we’re using more and more fossil fuels that create their own dysfunctions such as climate change and respiratory illness.
That’s why I simply choose to not take his opinions literally, but instead as a demonstration of how a myopic system works. That is, a dysfunctional system with its own aims would resist solutions that involve reconfiguring itself. What’s novel to that system is threatening and that threat gets magnified each time it’s mentioned. This is exactly how he treats nuclear power. And I had to think he did it with the purpose of demonstrating how systems resist change, or I would have thrown the book across the room.
Whether or not he really held the rotten opinions he shares, I have to think Gall would approve of this reading inasmuch as it got me to think more critically about the systems I live with. As he put it with his characteristic blend of eccentricity and grand authority: “THE MEANING OF A COMMUNICATION IS THE BEHAVIOR THAT RESULTS.”