From Systems-Thinking to Systems-Sensing
A key to unlocking freedom from the frustration of being "a cog in the machine"
Mechanistic systems thinking, while powerful, can feel limited when we’re dealing with messy, real-world problems that impact us on a visceral level. Complexity science combined with evolutionary psychology, can help us understand the limitations of quantitative measurement and purely intellectual approaches to complex issues. Shifting our perspective from cold data systems thinking to include warm data systems sensing offers us a path toward emergent solutions to wicked problems.
Systems Thinking and Its Limits
Systems thinking traditionally focuses on the interconnectedness of parts within a whole. The industrial age has predisposed many of us to view systems thinking through the metaphor of a complicated machine such as a car engine or a computer. Each part contributes to the system’s whole and overall function. This metaphor is imperfect however, especially when we apply systems thinking to human situations—relationships, personal struggles, organizational challenges. Human and humane systems aren’t just cold, logical machines. They’re made up of people with emotions, biases, and individual drives rooted in evolutionary psychology.
Systems thinkers are prone to stay in logical numbers, words and argument “head space”, detached from embodied experience and emotions. This approach is great for designing solutions to engineering problems but often struggles when applied to social or emotional dynamics, where the complex “moving parts” are human drives, responses, and emotions that are difficult to define or measure.
Introducing Systems Feeling: The Body-Mind Connection
“Systems feeling” takes us from an intellectual view of systems to an embodied one. In an evolutionary sense, humans didn’t survive by thinking alone; we survived by feeling, sensing, and intuitively responding to complex social and environmental cues. This is where evolutionary psychology gives us insight. Our emotions evolved as fast, adaptive responses to the world around us, guiding us to make decisions when there wasn’t time for logical processing.
In a way, emotions are our body's way of sensing the system we're in. When a friend is feeling frustration, for example, their body is actually providing information about the “health” of the social or emotional system they’re experiencing. Systems feeling involves paying attention to these emotional signals, recognizing them as part of the system’s feedback loop.
This shift to systems feeling is an acknowledgment that feelings themselves can be valuable information within a complex system. Instead of disregarding emotions as "noise" in rational systems thinking, systems feeling integrates emotions as signals, guiding us to navigate complexity in a way that feels grounded and human.
Expanding to Systems Sensing: Beyond Thinking and Feeling
Now, if we want to go even further, we can think about moving from systems feeling to what we might call “systems sensing.” Systems sensing broadens the scope even beyond our emotional feedback and tries to incorporate multiple perspectives and modalities of experience. It’s a more holistic, multi-perspectival approach that considers information from every possible channel, not just our thoughts or feelings, but also instincts, social cues, and even intuition.
Imagine systems sensing like this: it’s as if you are trying to “sense” the system you’re in with your whole self and through your environment, much like a spider senses vibrations in its web. A spider doesn’t only “think” or “feel” its way around. Instead, it uses a complex sensory and web-enabled network to understand changes in the environment around it. For humans, systems sensing would involve becoming highly attuned to multiple sources of information within a complex system, whether those are feelings, intuitions, body language, social dynamics, or subtle changes in tone and context.
Practical Framework: Cultivating Systems Sensing
Now, let’s put this together into a practical way of understanding how systems sensing might look in a real-world scenario:
Head (Thinking): Start with a cognitive overview of the system. Try to map the parts and connections, just as you would in traditional systems thinking. This step gives you a logical framework to work with.
Heart (Feeling): Then, tune into your emotions and feelings about the situation. Notice any anxiety, frustration, excitement, or empathetic response. Instead of viewing these as irrational “noise,” see them as signals about the system's relational and emotional dynamics.
Gut (Instinct/Intuition): Tap into your instincts. Evolutionary psychology shows us that humans evolved to sense things that the rational mind misses, such as threats, social alliances, or hidden opportunities. If something feels “off” or intuitively correct, consider this input seriously as part of your sensing toolkit. Test out these intuitions and use the feedback to further attune your skills.
Web (Holistic Awareness): This final level involves being open to all available sensory information, cultivating an awareness that isn’t bound by thoughts, feelings, or even instincts alone. It might include noticing subtle social dynamics, the body language of others, or ambient environmental signals. It involves an intentional awareness of the holistic context or space along the lines of David Ronfedlt’s TIMN framework (tribes, institutions, markets and networks). In this way, the contextual space acts as an informed “teacher”.
This layered approach—moving from head to heart to gut to the wider web, and then integrating these through broader sensory awareness—helps build a systems-sensing perspective that is both deeply personal and holistically grounded.
Applying Systems Sensing to Complex Situations
Imagine you’re in a complex organizational meeting with tension about a new policy. Here’s how systems sensing might look:
Think: You mentally map the stakeholders, their interests, and the potential outcomes of the policy. Traditional systems thinking gives you a logical structure here.
Feel: As you observe the room, you pick up on your own emotional reactions—say, a sense of nervousness about potential conflict or a surge of empathy for a colleague under pressure. You recognize that these feelings are part of the system’s emotional landscape, giving you clues about unspoken issues or alliances.
Intuit: You notice subtle cues—perhaps one person seems closed off, or another seems unusually energized. Trusting these instincts, you might adjust your approach or probe further to uncover the hidden dynamics they hint at.
Synthesize: Finally, you step back mentally to “sense” the room as a whole, integrating aspects of culture, the market or your networks as contextual layers of consideration. This big-picture awareness helps you perceive the meeting as a complex web of feelings, goals, and unseen pressures, helping you navigate the interaction with a deeper, more balanced understanding.
The Evolutionary Psychology of Systems Sensing
Our ancestors survived not by isolating their thinking or feeling but by integrating them with instinctive and holistic responses. A systems-sensing approach taps into that evolutionary wiring, helping us respond to complexity in a way that uses our whole sensory apparatus. It’s a return to a mode of understanding where knowledge isn’t just cerebral but embodied, felt, and sensed—a mode of knowing that’s just as old as humanity itself.
This way of engaging with complexity brings us back to our full human potential, aligning with our evolved capacities for holistic perception and nuanced interaction. In modern life, systems sensing could transform how we approach everything from relationships to organizational challenges, enabling us to meet complexity with the full breadth of human awareness.