System structure produces behavior revealed as events over time

“System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.”^[1]

Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. … We are less likely to be surprised if we can see how events accumulate into dynamic patterns of behavior. … The behavior of a system is its performance over time—its growth, stagnation, decline, oscillation, randomness, or evolution. If the news did a better job of putting events into historical context, we would have better behavior-level understanding, which is deeper than event-level understanding. When a systems thinker encounters a problem, the first thing he or she does is look for data, time graphs, the history of the system. That’s because long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why.^[1:1]

#systems #systems-thinking #emergence

See also:

• Systems thinking accounts for events, structure, and behavior (over time)
• Structure influences behavior