Just before addressing the Assumption of Causality in our Wayfinder Framework is Wayfinder 2: The Assumption of Boundaries (Ethics and Power).
To successfully address the Assumption of Boundaries—shifting from treating system boundaries as objective, natural facts to recognizing them as subjective, ethical choices that exercise power—practitioners must enact the following steps:
1. Recognize Boundaries as Epistemological, Not Ontological
You must stop believing that a system’s boundary exists “out there” in the physical world. A boundary is an intellectual distinction drawn by an observer,. Because you (the observer) choose what to include inside the “system” (what you can control) and what to exclude into the “environment” (what you take as a given constraint), drawing a boundary is an arbitrary and subjective act,.
2. Acknowledge that Drawing a Boundary is an Exercise of Power
By deciding what is “in” and what is “out,” the decision-maker inherently decides whose values matter and whose do not. You must recognize that the technical act of defining the scope of a project or system automatically creates “insiders” and “outsiders,” establishing a dynamic of power and potential marginalization.
3. Conduct a Boundary Critique (The “Is” vs. “Ought”)
To manage the ethics of your boundaries, you must apply Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), developed by Werner Ulrich and C. West Churchman. This requires rigorously interrogating your boundary judgments by asking questions in two modes: descriptive (“What is”) and normative (“What ought to be”),.
- The Client: Who is the actual beneficiary of the system, versus who ought to be the beneficiary?,
- The Decision-Maker: Who is currently in control of the resources, versus who ought to have that power?,
- The Purpose: What is the actual purpose of the system, versus what ought to be the purpose?,
4. Give Voice to the “Witness” (The Marginalized)
Traditional systems engineering only considers the client (beneficiary) and the decision-maker. Addressing the boundary assumption requires explicitly identifying the “witness”—the people who are affected by the system’s outputs but are entirely excluded from its design and control (often the victims of the system),,. You must actively ask how the affected ought to be represented to emancipate them from the coercion of the system’s experts,.
5. Avoid the “Environmental Fallacy”
C. West Churchman warns that if you define your system boundaries too narrowly, you will commit the “environmental fallacy”. This occurs when you optimize a localized component (like maximizing factory output) while ignoring the broader environment, thereby shifting the costs (like pollution or social decay) outside your boundary and making the whole system worse,. To prevent this, you must continuously “sweep in” variables from the environment—including ethical, aesthetic, and social constraints—to ensure your localized solution is not causing catastrophic unintended consequences elsewhere,.