System Architecture — How systems are structured and organized
Rules regulating information flow between subsystems and between the system and its environment.
What are Boundaries?
A system's active resistance to change in favor of familiar equilibrium
What is Homeostasis?
This term refers to a system’s capacity to alter structure under stress
What is Adaptability?
This term refers to the mutual, recursive influence among system elements
What is Circular Causality?
Overly rigid boundaries limiting connection and responsiveness between system members
Disengagement
A unit that is simultaneously a whole and part of a larger system.
What is a Holon/Subsystem?
This term refers to the state of balance among system forces, whether healthy or not
What is Equilibrium?
Change that transforms the system's fundamental rules and organizing structure
What is Second-Order Change?
This term refers to information a system receives about its output to regulate future behavior.
What is Feedback?
This term refers to a closed system's tendency toward increasing disorder and disorganization.
This term refers to organizational layering of subsystems with differentiated roles, functions, and authority.
What is Hierarchy?
This term refers to how a system corrects departures from its baseline, restoring equilibrium.
What is Deviation Dampening?
This term refers to a deviation-amplifying loop that drives a system away from its prior equilibrium.
What is Positive Feedback?
This term refers to behavioral change within existing system rules without structural reorganization.
What is First-Order Change?
This term refers to how different starting points can produce the same systemic outcome.
Equifinality
This term refers to a larger context or system within which the system of focus is a part.
What is Suprasystem?
This term refers to a deviation-correcting loop that returns a system toward its reference state.
What is Negative Feedback?
This term refers to how a system magnifies departures from its baseline, driving change.
What is Deviation Amplification?
This term describes how the observer studies a system from an assumed external, objective position.
What is First-Order Cybernetics?
This term refers to how the same starting conditions can produce different outcomes depending on systemic organization.
Equipotentiality
This term refers to the degree of systemic permeability to outside exchange and feedback.
What are Open and Closed Systems?
This term refers to the importation of energy or information that increases systemic organization and complexity.
What is Negentropy?
This term refers to a system's capacity to restructure its fundamental organization in response to demands.
What is Morphogenesis?
This term refers to the study of self-regulatory feedback processes in systems.
What are Cybernetics?
This term describes how the observer is recognized as part of the system being observed.
What is Second-Order Cybernetics