Systems theory for your online creative business (the fun and easy way)

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

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If you say that in today's world of data-science voodoo, you might get shanked.

Analysis is the big game in town.

Take everything apart. Find the smallest pieces. Play with the numbers in your shiny new AI driven models. Figure out the laws that rule the parts... the "first principles"... and you know it all.

The big-brains that work this way are the same kinds of big-brain that brought you UK Computer Expert Neil Ferguson's model of the apocalypse.

Totally wrong. As detached from reality as any hippie's bad trip... but slap a "science" label on it and it's treated with reverence due a priest delivering the Latin Mass.

That's not how we do things around here at RP. Break all the rules with a smile on your face and a song in your heart, that's what I say.

Why not? These emperors have no clothes.

The data-obsessed analyzers are -- literally and metaphorically -- missing the forests for all the trees in the way.

When you don't believe there's any such thing as a forest it's hard to add up all your tree-data and discover one.

But the world is full of forests. Overflowing with them. And I ain't just talking about trees.

Everything interesting that you care about is a "whole". A complete, consistent, integral unity. Once you take it apart it stops working and stops being interesting.

That category includes living things, social groups, organizations that you work for and manage, other people, and even your own body, your health, and your mind.

When nerds divide up a whole into its parts, they destroy it.

Division of wholes into parts is a powerful and useful method... if you're doing physics or chemistry.

It's less compelling in almost every other field.

Try to explain "traffic" by studying the molecules in your car's engine.

Surprised that modern health and medical science has led to sicker, fatter, unhappier people? That's what happens when you turn health into a chemistry problem.

For sure you should not assume that the parts are "more real" than the whole object. That's a trap for arrogant physicists who talk too much and understand too little.

I'm not just whistling Dixie for my own enjoyment here. This isn't a made-up "conspiracy theory" I found on Youtube.

I'm talking about a science called systems theory.

The science that studies whole systems as wholes, without breaking them up into independent parts.

Frank Herbert wrote Dune as an "ecological" story.
The desert planet Arrakis shapes the people living there... and we discover that Arrakis itself was subject to engineering by the native sand-worm creatures.

Frank Herbert used systems thinking to create one of the most memorable and best-loved SF stories ever written.

And it's got serious benefits for your business, too.

Here's just a few things that systems theory can do for you as a creator and creative entrepreneur.