What does POSIWID mean to you?
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What does POSIWID mean to you?
As #systems | #complexity | #cybernetics becomes more and more mainstream again, one of the things that has been interesting to me is the way ‘POSIWID’ has ‘gone viral’ on Twitter.
Nearly every day, someone shares the image of this wikipedia quote:
“The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system’s side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the #POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.”
What’s most interesting is the range of reactions this regularly provokes:
- people who see this as showing evil intent underlying explicit intent — ‘what it does’ is what someone REALLY wanted it to do.
- people who say ‘but that’s absurd! The whole POINT of design and engineering is working to make the purpose be the thing you want it to be!’
- people who just see it as an observational point about divergence between intent and outcomes
And so on…
Personally, I’m with Donella Meadows — the core point of POSIWID is that “Purposes are deduced by an observer from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals” (from Thinking in Systems).
It’s one of the most powerful statements in the field, because it makes the point that both ‘purpose’ and ‘systems’ are dependent on the observer and assigned as such.
What does it tell you?
