Passive Regulation: General Systems Design Principles

Passive Regulation: General Systems Design Principles

Volume 2 of the General Systems Thinking Series

by

Gerald M. Weinberg and Daniela Weinberg

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

Gerald M. Weinberg on Smashwords

Passive Regulation: General Systems Design Principles

Copyright © 2011 by Gerald M. Weinberg

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

Dear Reader: Even with many layers of editing, mistakes can slip through, alas. But, together, we can eradicate the nasty nuisances. If you encounter typos or errors in this book, please send them to me at: <hardpretzel@earthlink.net> Thank you! —Jerry Weinberg

(Formerly half of the physical book: On the Design of Stable Systems)

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

Original Preface

Chapter 1 • The Problem of Persistence

Chapter 2 • Aggregates

Chapter 3 • Birth-Free Aggregates

Chapter 4 • Reasoning About Aggregates

Chapter 5 • Modeling Differentiated Aggregates

Chapter 6 • Programs for Models of Differentiated Aggregates

Chapter 7 • Structure and Behavior

Chapter 8 • The Structure-Regulation Law

Epilogue

Bibliography

Appendix: Some Useful Mathematical Notation Explained

Further Reading

About the Cover

TO BEAUTIFUL JOE

Preface to the E-book Edition

With books, as with children, you never know what you've produced until they've grown up. When Jerry's book An Introduction to General Systems Thinking was first published, we imagined it would be used by practical systems designers in a variety of disciplines, not as a university text. To be sure, Dani used it in a graduate seminar in Anthropology, but she was biased. Then, after a few years, Jerry was surprised yet delighted to discover how many other courses were using it.

About the time of that discovery, we first published parent of this volume, under the title On the Design of Stable Systems. Looking at the original preface, it's easy to see that—perhaps influenced by the earlier companion volume—we thought we were producing an academic work. That impression undoubtedly influenced the title, leading us to the rather abstract and distant sounding On the Design of Stable Systems. (We actually received purchases from some horse owners who wanted to design stables for their mounts.) It also influenced the original publisher to promote the book solely as a text, where it was only moderately successful.

On the other hand, some very practical people managed to discover the book despite the publisher's promotion. We received many kind letters testifying to its practical usefulness—and complaining about the title. So, when the opportunity came to reprint the book, we sought to make two changes. First, we found a publisher who was more attuned to the people who design and build real systems in the real world. Second, we changed the title.

The new title, we hope, gives just the right impression of the book's contents and usefulness. It is a practical book about systems design—not just computer systems, but information systems in the larger sense: human organizations of all kinds, and systems in nature, like organisms, species, or forests.

With such a general scope, it obviously cannot be a nuts and bolts or "recipe book, yet it has many extremely practical applications to the daily work of people who design, for example, information processing systems, training programs, business organizations, parks, or cities.

The field of software development has recently become enamored of methodologies—integrated step-by-step approaches to developing and maintaining systems. Ours is not another methodology book—though the general principles we describe have an ancestral relationship to some of the popular methodologies. We believe they will make learning any methodology easier, because they are general principles—the sorts of things you need to know regardless of what methodology you use, or what kind of system you're designing or deciphering.

We considered using the title The Secrets of Systems Design, after Jerry's book The Secrets of Consulting, but we thought that would be confusing. It is about secrets, though—the deep thinking processes we use in our consulting and practice. These general ways of thinking about systems enable us to get quickly to the heart of existing organizations and information systems, to visualize new systems, and to design training and other interventions to catalyze the transformation from one to the other. Although we don't promise that such deep insights are easy, we've seen how much they can empower you. In the end, that's the only good reason for publishing a book, whatever the title.

Now, as we enter the e-book era, we've made some further changes to make the book more accessible. Based on reader feedback, we've come to realize that we had written two books in one. Both books are about stability and design, but the first half of the original book was about passive stability—through aggregates. We have separated out those first eight chapters for this volume: Passive System Regulation: General Design Principles. We've done this to make each book more focused and less expensive. We hope they now better fits your needs as a reader.

Dani & Jerry Weinberg

Original Preface

This book is the result of an 18-year collaboration between two people, in two different disciplines, who share a fascination and love for the human animal. Whether from the vantage point of computers or anthropology, we are excited by the capacities of the human mind and alarmed by some of its products.

Our disciplines seem to begin at opposite poles—machine systems and social systems—but they converge as soon as people enter the picture. Thus the social scientist is concerned with the cultural meaning of math anxiety, while the computer scientist teaches programmers to overcome their people anxiety.

Both our disciplines daily come to grips with the subtle interplay between system and environment. Cultures and computers both exhibit the effects of adaptation to a constantly changing environment. And anthropologists and computer scientists equally balk at the difficulties of studying conservation and persistence.

This collaboration has been nourished, too, on another level. Our professional activities oscillate between the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical. The computer scientist designs program logic and enables people to work productively in teams. The anthropologist wrestles with concepts in the classroom and drinks wine with natives in the field. We are accustomed to switching modes, shifting communication styles, all the time. It is perhaps this instability in our professional lives that has taught us to value uncertainty and to make a virtue of indeterminacy. General systems thinking has been, for us, a way of understanding the complexity of our own lives. We sincerely hope it will be the same for you.

This book is a companion volume to An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, which means that either may be used separately, although they go well together. If you have already read An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, you definitely have all the prerequisites you need to read this volume. If you haven't read the companion, you may well find that you will benefit most from reading this volume first, since you have it in your hand.

If you run into any difficulty with the mathematical notation in this volume, try using the Appendix for guidance. If that doesn't solve the problem, and you still feel that the notation is seriously eroding your enjoyment of this volume, then it may be best to set this one aside and read the companion first.

But keep in mind that a major goal of these books is to reduce your anxiety about mathematics, and to open doors that any mathematical deficiency may have closed. If the companion volume is not easily at hand, try reading through this one, ignoring anything you consider too mathematical.

The Questions for Further Research at the end of each chapter should be read as part of the text. They give you an impression of the scope of problems to which the chapter materials might apply. Should some problem strike you as particularly intriguing, make note of it and then use the references to take it up later. Since the book is intended to introduce you to new ways of thinking, many quotations and references have been given—not to lend a patina of scholarship, but to give you numerous pointers toward other paths to learning.

Following the suggestions of several readers of the earlier volume, we've made a few changes to improve the readability of the book. Chapters have been made shorter and more numerous with more topical divisions to provide places for rest and contemplation. References have been moved to a consolidated bibliography at the end of the book to be less distracting to those reading for the pure pleasure of reading. Recommended and Suggested readings have been dropped, as have notational exercises, because most people surveyed either ignored them or found them perhaps patronizing. Those readers interested in suggestions for further reading will find numerous clues in the body of the text.

For classroom use, there is a great variety of options. We have used this material in a course of its own, and also in a sequel to a course based on An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. Most of the people who use the companion volume as a text have pretty good ideas of their own about how to use it. Many have followed suggestions given in the earlier volume, some of which bear repeating here.

This text and the previous one have been used, to our knowledge, in courses in management science, computer science, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, metallurgy, medicine, architecture, psychology, theology, and philosophy. The texts are suitable for any level, from sophomores on up, if adjustments are made by assigning differing amounts of supplementary reading and questions for further research. The research questions are usually suitable for either a short essay or a term paper. In higher-level courses we have asked students to prepare one or more of these questions for class presentation.

The very flexibility of these books and the generality of their material make them difficult to set in a university curriculum, yet many, many professors have overcome these problems and achieved great success. Some of them have told us that our suggestions in An Introduction to General Systems Thinking were useful in getting started. If you arc contemplating using this book as a text, look there first.But if you need further advice, the authors would be more than pleased to hear from you and to contribute what they have learned from their own experiences and from contributions of others. In any case, if reading the book itself doesn't give you many ideas, then perhaps we're all in trouble.

Bibliographic Note

The material in this book, accumulated over the better part of two decades, comes from an incredible variety of sources. It has survived more than twenty moves, plus another dozen or so seasonal crossings of the Atlantic. It has been manipulated by more than ten editorial assistants, using at least five bibliographic systems. To top off all this possibility for error, a substantial chunk of the original bibliographic material was misplaced in the most recent move, five years ago.

As a result of these perturbations, the bibliographic material has not been entirely stable. When preparing this manuscript for the printer, we discovered the large loss and a number of smaller problems. In order to reconstruct the bibliography, we and our assistants undertook several hundred hours of detective work, most of which was successful. In the end, however, there remain bibliographic problems which we cannot seem to correct with any reasonable amount of effort.

For example, some of the references are from editions of books not available anywhere in Nebraska, and it has proved impossible to check (or even provide) all page numbers. Several references to articles have been almost completely lost, with only the author's name and perhaps a date remaining. Sometimes even that much is missing.

Rather than omit material for which we are unable to provide exact, checked references, we have decided to give what reference material we have and to beg our readers to help us, wherever possible, to improve this information for subsequent printings. We intend no discourtesy to the original authors, and certainly do not offer their original material as ours. We have included direct quotations, even in those few cases where we have lost track of the author. We felt that authors would prefer that their thoughts be spread widely rather than being omitted because of an unfortunate bibliographic accident. We especially hope that we will be able to fill in all the blanks before several printings have passed.

In all, the problems have affected perhaps 2 percent of the bibliographic items, and most of those are merely missing page numbers. We don't think the problem will in any way affect the general usefulness of the book, but we apologize for any inconvenience it may cause any reader. [Note added for the eBook edition: Many of these problems are easily solved today with the internet and its search engines.]

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed in many ways to the publication of this book. We wish to express our special thanks to the following friends who have been closest to the project over the years: Sheila Abend, Lorri Campbell, Jim Greenwood, Mike Gunn, Linda Hollcroft, Joan Kaufmann, Shanna McGoff, Cheryl Plum, Mona Thompson, Melissa Weiksnar. Encouraging, questioning, searching out literature, criticizing, typing, preparing the manuscript—in all these ways, their help has been invaluable. We also owe an important debt to our many students, and to the readers of the previous volume who took the time to send us their comments.

Gerald M. Weinberg Daniela Weinberg, Eagle, Nebraska

Chapter 1 • The Problem of Persistence

There is a widespread assumption in modern social science that social continuity requires no explanation... .

The assumption of inertia, that cultural and social continuity do not require explanation, obliterates the fact that both have to be recreated anew in each generation, often with great pain and suffering. To maintain and transmit a value system, human beings are punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught to read sociology. (Moore, 1966)

Barrington Moore is right about social continuity, but wrong about social science. It's not that social science assumes that social continuity requires no explanation. There are deep-seated reasons why social sciences, more so than other sciences, evade or disguise the explanation of continuity.

If Moore is right, we have here a widespread nonpractice—something that continues in many places at many times. This nonpractice itself, then, by Moore's argument, requires an explanation. It does not continue by mere inertia. It is not explained by the term assumption. To maintain and transmit this assumption, this nonpractice, there must be activities of some sort—perhaps no heroes or bullies, punching or shooting, but activities all the same.

It will clear the way for the rest of our volume if we devote this first chapter to the question of why continuity is seldom explained, and why we choose to explain it now, in terms of general systems thinking.

Weinberg's Law(s) of Twins

What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power. The people who enjoy the greatest glory in the United States are film stars, but they can be put in their place by the committee for Un-American Activities, which enjoys no glory whatever. —Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

Every systems thinker harbors a secret dream to be immortalized in the name of some law—Darwin's Principle of Natural Selection, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, Shannon s Noisy Channel Theorem, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Weinberg's Law of Twins.

Weinberg's Law of Twins?! Alas, long before your authors acquired the name Weinberg, that one slim thread of immortality was forever broken for them. An outstanding mathematician, remembered today for many important contributions to genetics and statistics, stated a principle concerning the frequency of twin births among all births, a principle remembered today as Weinbergs Law of Twins.

To any later Weinberg, the existence of this law was an impediment to broad generalization. Knowing Weinberg's Law was already taken, what was the use of dreaming up another one? Then one day, a realization came. Since the law was Weinberg's Law of Twins, some other worthy law could be given the name of Weinberg's Law, as long as it wasn't a law of twins. After all, there was the Hardy-Weinberg Law, which nobody confused with the other one, the one about twins.

And so the search for the key to fame and fortune resumed with the vigor of a long caged beast. And finally, it came—a law so worthy that it predicted over 99% of all human behavior. Surely, of all laws, this one deserved immortality.

Like many truly great laws, this one had the most humble beginnings. The Weinbergs were sitting on Manhattan's Number 44 bus, heading up Broadway in the gloom of a winter rush hour, when a haggard but pretty young woman boarded with eight children in tow.

How much is the fare? she asked the driver.

Thirty-five cents for adults, and children under five ride free.

Okay, she said, shifting one of the two tiniest she carried under her arms so she could reach her purse. She dropped two coins into the meter and started with her entourage down the aisle.

Wait just a minute, lady! the driver commanded, as only a New York driver can. You don't expect me to believe that all eight of them children is under five!

Of course they are, she said indignantly. "These two are four, the two girls are three, the toddlers arc two, and these