The word “system” comes from the Greek word synhistanai, which means, “to place together”. To understand things in a systemic way means to place them into a context, to establish the nature of their relationships within their environment, and to explore how properties of the system emerge at different levels of organization. To think systemically means to understand how a system operates as a whole made of embedded systemic parts and how it communicates with its environment.

A system is not measured by hierarchical value or size, and neither are its parts: systems, as embedded compounds or as enfolding networks, differ only in their level of complexity and in the character (pattern) of their organization. To think systemically means to relate to the system as a part of a larger whole, i.e. how the system is interdependent with other communicating systems. If we concentrate on the system’s relations instead of on its elements, we can view a system as a network. Alike, we can view a part of the system as an embedded network, and the whole of the system as a network embedded in its contextual or environmental network. Each node of the network itself appears as a network of nodes, and so on.

Dynamic systems thinking is essentially process-oriented thinking. Every structure is seen as a manifestation of underlying processes. It is contextual as opposed to Cartesian analytic thinking: it concentrates on basic principles of organization within and outside the system.

In the Cartesian paradigm scientific descriptions are believed to be objective – that is, independent of the observer and the process of knowing. Following experiments that explored the strange behavior of the subatomic particles, Heisenberg included the observer as an influential agent of change. In his words, “The identification of specific patterns as “objects” depends on the human observer and the process of knowing.” Experiments in physics (8) proved that the presence of the observer determines the outcome of the observed process. The observer establishes a functional relationship with the observed and thus becomes an influential part of the observed phenomenon’s environment.

(8) Maarlan Scurry performed an experiment with a photon laser, later on called the “quantum eraser experiment,” which showed that photons behaved as if they knew what awaited them at the end of their course. The path the photon would take at a bifurcation point was “spontaneously” determined by what the observer had put at the end of the two paths. It is not possible that the photon “knows” what awaits it, yet the observer does. Paul Davis concludes: “... the specific nature of past reality ... isn’t finally fixed until the entire experiment is brought to a close. Even when the signal photons have been detected, the record of the past remains not only incomplete but undecided ...” (Davis, About Time, 176)

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