Skip to content

The Culture Hack Method

The Culture Hack Method

Deep Dive: Systems

What is a System?

At its most basic, systems are made up of people, relationships, and materials – organized around a shared purpose. Systems are everywhere – ecological, economic, political, cultural. At Culture Hack Labs, we are interested in how narratives shape the way systems behave, evolve, or break down. 

A system is a set of interdependent elements that interact to form a whole, producing outcomes that emerge from their relationships rather than from individual components alone (Holling, 2001). But the outcomes of systems – whether life-affirming or extractive  – depend not just on structure or feedback loops, but on the values, worldviews, and paradigms guiding them.

The Evolution of Systems Thinking 

Our understanding of “systems” is rooted in the fields of Philosophy, Systems Theory, Complexity Science, and Evolutionary Theory. These fields explore how complex systems evolve, self-organise and adapt over time. We especially draw on “third-order” systems thinking (see below).

  • First-order systems (a shift to “wholes”) (mid-20th century) developed as a response to the limitations of reductionist science that tended to break systems down into parts. Fields of study were developed such as General Systems Theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1940s), Cybernetics (Norbert Wiener, 1948), and System Dynamics (Jay Forrester, 1960s) which proposed systems are objective, external wholes. The focus was on feedback, control, and regulation.. This view underpinned much of modern techno-industrial design – often reproducing the very patterns that now require transformation.
  • Second-order systems (a shift to relationality) (1970/80s) brought the observer into the picture. Systems are not neutral – they’re co-constructed. Thinkers like Heinz von Foerster, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (autopoiesis – self-producing systems) introduced concepts like self-reference, and embodied cognition, and reframed systems as living, participatory processes. Knowledge became embodied, relational, and situated.
  • Third-order systems (a shift to cultural contexts) (2000s) added cultural depth. Systems exist within systems – “nested” in history, language, values, and myth. This is often referred to as third-order cybernetics, relational systems theory, or cybersemiotics. Thinkers like C.S. Holling,  Ranulph Glanville , Søren Brier, and Louis Kauffman emphasized nested systems (systems nested in wider cultural contexts), adaptive cycles, and the semiotic and narrative dimensions of systemic life. They highlighted a system’s evolution is deeply intertwined with human values/narratives that shape it. 

Footnotes

  1. Holling, C. S. (2001). Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems. Ecosystems, 4(5), 390–405.
  2. Systems Theory readings; RebelWisdom (2023) Predicting the Pandemic, Nora Bateson, Joe Brewer & Jim Rutt.
  3. Complexity Science readings
  4. Greenwood, D.J., 2015. Evolutionary Systems Thinking: What Gregory Bateson, Kurt Lewin, and Jacob Moreno Offered to Action Research that Still Remains to be Learned, in: The SAGE Handbook of Action Research. SAGE.
  5. Reductionist science refers to an approach in science, rooted in Newtonian Physics and Classical Biology that breaks down complex phenomena into their simplest components, isolating each part, for the sake of analysis and it is assumed to provide a picture of the whole system.
  6. Von Bertalanffy, L. (1968). General system theory. New York, 41973(1968), 40.
  7. Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics. Scientific American, 179(5), 14-19
  8. Forrester J W (2009). Some Basic Concepts in System Dynamics.
  9. This aligned with the emergence of “social constructivism” –  a shift to more relational epistemologies (ways of knowing) as a critical response to the belief in scientific objectivity, rationalism, and the notion of an objective, value-free knowledge.
  10. https://batesoninstitute.org/gregory-bateson/
  11. Autopoiesis readings: “Autopoiesis describes the capacity of an entity to reproduce itself. As a concept, it was first introduced in theoretical biology to explain cognition and the essence of life (see Maturana and Varela, 1980) and was then further developed in general systems theory (for example, von Förster, 1984). It has been widely applied in mathematics, in the study of cognition, and in studies of the nervous system as well as in information systems, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence (see Mingers, 1995).”
  12. https://chaturvedimayank.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/third-and-higher-order-cybernetics/
  13. Brier, S (2024). Cybersemiotics Why Information Is Not Enough .
  14. Holling, C. S., Gunderson, L. H., & Peterson, G. D. (2002). Sustainability and panarchies. In L. H. Gunderson & C. S. Holling (Eds.), Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems (pp. 63–102). Island Press
  15. Holling, C. S., & Gunderson, L. H. (2002). Resilience and adaptive cycles. In L. H. Gunderson & C. S. Holling (Eds.), Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems (pp. 25–62). Island Press; Kauffman, L. H. (2011). Eigenforms and quantum physics. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 18(1–2), 61–74.; Glanville, R. (2003). Second order cybernetics. In F. Parra-Luna (Ed.), Systems science and cybernetics (pp. 1–24).
Loading...