John Gall [Gall - SYSTEMANTICS. THE SYSTEMS BIBLE

The immediate motivation for undertaking this work was provided by the bizarre experience of a colleague of the author (let us call him Jones), a medical scientist specializing in the study of Mental Retardation. That field until recently was a very unfashionable one for investigation, and Jones considered himself fortunate to be employed as Research Associate at a small State Home for Retarded Children. In this humble, even despised position, he was too low on the Civil Service scale to merit the attention of administrators, and he was therefore left alone to tinker with ideas in his chosen field. He was happily pursuing his own research interests when, following Presidential interest and national publicity, Mental Retardation suddenly became a fashionable subject. Jones received an urgent invitation to join an ambitious federally-funded project for a systematic attack upon the problem of mental retardation.

Thinking that this new job, with its ample funds and facilities, would advance him in his own career while also facilitating his research, Jones joined. Within three months his research had come to a haIt, and within a year he was unable to speak or think intelligently in the field of mental retardation . He had, in fact, become retarde d relative to his previous condition.

Looking about him to discover, if possible, what had happened, Jones found that a dozen other skilled professionals who made up the staff of the project had experienced a similar catastrophe. That ambitious project, designed to advance solutions to the problem, had in fact taken most of the available workers in the field and neutralized them.

What had gone wrong? Jones, knowing of the authors interest in Systems Operation, turned to him for advice, and the two investigators jointly tried to analyze the problem. They first of all reviewed Parkinsons classic essay on Institutional Paralysis hoping to find enlightenmen t there. Was the disease a fulminating case of Injelititis? Obviously not: the professional staff of the Institute were competent, dedicated, and hardworking. Furthermore, the administrators were experienced, energetic, and extremely logical in their approach to problems . The Institute was failing in spite of the best efforts of every one of its member s .

Was it an example of the Peter Principle , in which members of the staff had ascended the hierarchy until they had reached jobs for which they were not fitted? No. This was a new organization, and no one had been promoted very far . Slowly it began to dawn upon the investigators that we humans do not yet understand the basic laws governing the behavior of complex organization s . A great enterprise can flounder helplessly or even wither away before our very eyes, as a result of malignant but as yet unnamed disorders, or in response to the operation of natural laws whose Newton has not yet been born to announce them to Mankind.

Faced with this realization, and moved by the dramatic and touching crisis that had overtaken his colleague, the author resolved to redouble his researches into the causes of organizational ineptitude and Systems malfunction, seeking deep below the surface for the hidden forces that cause the best-laid plans to gang agley. Little did he suspect, at that moment, where those studies would lead. He had not yet experienced the blinding illumination of the OPERATIONAL FALLACY. The FUNDAMENTAL THEOREM OF SYSTEMANTICS lay well over the horizon. Even the relatively simple and easy-to-understand GENERALIZED UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE was not yet a gleam. Those and other deep- ranging and depressing generalizations were to come only much later, after many minutes, hours, even days of exhaustive researches conducted under the least auspicious circumstances.

What follows is the fruit of those researches, set forth as briefly and as simply as possible, in a style that is deliberately austere and (the author may be permitted to hope) even not without a certain elegance, derived from the essentially mathematical nature of the science itself. The reader must imagine for him-or-herself at what cost in blood, sweat, and tears and in time spent in deep observation of contemporary Systemsthese simple statements have been wrung from the messy complexity of the real world. They are offered in the hope and faith that a knowledge of the natural laws of complex Systems will enable Mankind to avoid some of the more egregious errors of the past.

At the very least it is hoped that this little book may serve as a warning to those who read it, thus helping to counter the headlong rush into Systemis m that characterizes our age. And who knows? Perhaps readers of this modest treatise will be stimulated to discover new Systems- insights of their own, that can lead to even higher achievements for the infant science of Systemantics.