The Grand View

Murray Gell-Mann, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1984, he helped establish the Santa Fe Institute, where he now works. He is close friends with writer Cormac McCarthy.

In his book The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and Complex (1994), Gell-Mann writes about his many intellectual passions – natural history, biological evolution, the history of language, and the study of creative thinking. He also discusses systems thinking in the following paragraphs:

Why should anyone try to think on such a grand scale? Shouldn't one plan a more manageable project that concentrates on a particular aspect of the world situation?

We live in an age of increasing specialization, and for good reason. Humanity keeps learning more about each field of study: and as every specialty grows, it tends to split into sub-specialties. That process happens over and over again, and it is necessary and desirable. However, there is also a growing need for specialization to be supplemented by integration. The reason is that no complex, nonlinear system can be adequately described by dividing it up into subsystems or into various aspects, defined beforehand. If those subsystems or those aspects, all in strong interaction with one another, are studied separately, even with great care, the results, when put together, do not give a useful picture of the whole. In that sense, there is profound truth in the old adage, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

People must therefore get away from the idea that serious work is restricted to beating to death a well-defined problem is a narrow discipline, while broadly integrative thinking is relegated to cocktail parties. In academic life, in bureaucracies, and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected. Yet anyone at the top of an organization, a president or prime minister or a CEO, has to make decisions as if all aspects of a situation, along with the interaction among those aspects, were being taken into account. It is reasonable for the leader, reaching down into the organization for help, to encounter only specialists and for integrative thinking to take place only when he or she makes the final intuitive judgment.