8 Systems Thinking
Chapter Table of Contents
The educational system in the US has these parts:
- Preschool and kindergarten,
- Elementary schools – grades 1-6,
- Middle schools – grades 7-8,
- High schools – grades 9-12, and
- Higher education, including 2-year community colleges, and 4-year colleges and universities.
We call this list of parts a “system” because the parts interact with each other to achieve overall goals, such as an educated population. The parts may interact through cause and effect or through the exchange of information or material. We can think of the input and output of the overall system, and we can also think about the input and output of each part; for example, some of the students who graduate from middle school (an output) go on to high school (an input). We can also think of the parts as being processes in the educational system.
In his book,Total Quality Control[1], Feigenbaum defines a system as:
A group or work pattern of interacting human and machine activities, directed by information, which operate on and/or direct material, information, energy, and/or humans to achieve a common specific purpose or objective.
Clearly this definition relates closely to industrial engineering and explains why some industrial engineering departments are called industrial and systems engineering. UTA’s department is called Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering. However, systems engineering is also used sometimes in a more limited meaning, to refer to designing a computer and information system.
When we define a system we implicitly draw a line around some parts to include those parts and to exclude others. For example, the educational system includes the schools, but not the roads students travel on to get to school or the organizations that employ students after they graduate. Generally, looking at a larger system is more accurate but harder. We can understand some aspects of the educational system without considering these other parts, but some aspects require looking at the larger system. We can still examine the educational system if we remember to include in our study its interactions with its environment, such as the transportation system and the employment system.
For the IE, the systems approach is important because it reminds us to consider the environment surrounding the system we are studying and to move the boundaries outward as much as possible so that we consider a problem in its larger context.
System Analysis
Some systems have feedback. Feedback in a system is when outputs are fed back in as inputs for future system action. This is sometimes called a feedback loop. The educational system doesn’t tend to have a lot of feedback and that may hamper improvement of the system. Have you ever been asked by your high school to give feedback on how well your education prepared you for college or for work?
The operation of a system that has evolved without conscious design or a system that has been designed piece b