Janos Korn - The Purpose of Change Is Problem Solving: Viewing Parts of the World in Terms of Their Structure Is Systems Thinking or Engineering Science

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Science and Design of Systems

Matador 2009

Network Modelling of Engineering Systems

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Linguistic Modelling of Scenarios

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Copyright 2016 Janos Korn

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. [A quotation from A. Einstein]

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. [On Marxs tombstone in Highgate Cemetery, Levene, 2010]

Ideas can be wonderful or evil but to turn them into action they need to be expressed in precise terms. Hence, the aim of current work is to turn speculative and fragmented thinking in the field of systems thinking into more basic and exact reasoning structures. [Janos Korn]

Contents

The author would like to express his gratitude again to his former colleagues, Dr Frank Huss and Mr John Cumbers to keep their memory alive, and to Mr Andras Takats, for all their contribution to the early development of linguistic modelling which took place in the 1980s. The cartoon below is dedicated to my former colleagues. My sincere thanks are extended to the Open University where I had been exposed to ideas of human activity scenarios and spent an inspiring period of my life. I am very grateful to the country of United Kingdom which accepted me as a citizen and gave me the opportunity of higher education and subsequent career.

Referring to the subtitle of this book, the systemic view of parts of the world is an empirical experience. However, current approaches to this view by and large may be seen expressed in terms of a wide variety and diversity of fragmented and speculative but stimulating, issues using vague and unfounded models. Engineering is about creating or designing and executing new and possibly novel schemes for the accomplishment of plans, desires, ideas, visions or objectives of individuals and organisations [from the world of plants, animals or humans]. The job of science is the creation of reliable knowledge about parts of the world. By engineering science is meant a science which is directly usable in the practice of engineering or problem solving. It is sympathetic to the engineering effort and is in accord with this effort. The intention of current work, in particular that of this book, is to describe the subject matter which may serve as a basis for engineering science, a joining of parts of systems engineering and systems science towards development of an engineering philosophy as a constituent of the three cultures [Lewin, 1981].

Looking back over the historic past we can say that individuals in the living sphere, in particular, human beings have been intensively engaged in preparing plans for and carrying out projects on a scale from small to very large. For example, a person bends down to tie his/her shoe laces appears to be a small project but there is no doubt that constructing a railway tunnel under the sea is a large project with an intermediate size project being when a bird produces a nest for laying her eggs or a plant turns its leaves towards the sunlight. In the course of aeons of time there have been countless examples of projects a few of the results of which still survive like ancient pyramids, cathedrals, bridges, ant hills and so on. Also, there is a huge number of projects the results of which are in current use and practice such as flying airplanes, watching televisions, using computers, armaments, newspapers, reading books, mobile phones, making financial investments, dresses, toys, hunting by a pride of lions, extracting nutrients from the soil by plants and countless others. Most man made objects are referred to as artefacts.

We can conclude that the common features of all projects appear to be :

A.There is a beneficiary [or otherwise] or a user or a consumer usually a living entity,

B.There is a product the task of which is to convey the benefit [or otherwise], the use or what is to be consumed to the beneficiary, it is usually the subject of invention, and

C.There is a producer with access to supplies and waste depository operating in an algorithm to avoid chaos towards producing the product and organised by management both of which can also have access to supply and waste disposal as necessary.

The activity or the process of accomplishment of projects has been going on unabated for millions of years to the present due to the inventiveness of humans and need for sustenance by living entities. And it is likely to continue in the future. Activities by animals and plants take place to facilitate survival, humans operate for gain, interest as well as for survival. Activities by natural phenomena take place without conscious purposes. We call all this activity systems engineering or engineering activity, a part of the proposed engineering science which is an age old activity without recourse to much of a theoretical basis with products surviving as evidence. However, the systems contributing to the activities have by and large faded out of the picture. It is only recently that the call for theoretical basis has arisen so far without much success. There is fragmentation of the subject with no unifying principles and uncertainty about the meaning and understanding of the basic concepts.

Here we have the first anomaly in engineering activity : Although engineering activity concerns all three points above as an integrated whole, it is predominantly preoccupied with the second, product design.

At this level the activity can cooperate with conventional science of physics by using the latters knowledge base. For example, an electric, dc motor to convert electrical to mechanical power is analysed and designed using principles from electromagnetic theory and mechanics. When it comes to represent the structure of a scenario which is modelled as a network in engineering systems or a semantic diagram in linguistic modelling, a product can appear as a network element or a theoretical object [Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013].

Conventional science is phenomenon based, it is by and large unable to cope and it is not intended to cope with phenomena involving more than a single object. Perhaps this is best seen by the difference in models used by conventional and systems science :

The structure of models in conventional science tends to reflect the