What are the ideas to use to investigate 'what a systems does not do'
To investigate “what a system does not do” or what does not happen within it, you must shift your epistemological lens from looking for positive, linear causes (what pushed X to happen) to investigating the constraints and absences that shape the system.
In systems thinking and complexity science, several profound frameworks and concepts are dedicated explicitly to this type of inquiry:
1. “Negative Explanation” (James Wilk & The Other Group)
In traditional science, we look for positive causes. In cybernetics and complexity, practitioners use Negative Explanation. This mode of inquiry asks, “Why is the system doing this, rather than something else?“.
- Instead of studying the visible moving parts, you investigate the constraints that precluded all other possibilities.
- The Other Group (TOG) uses the metaphor of a mold: to understand what a system does not do, you must stop looking at the cast parts and start looking at the “moulds used to cast the parts”—the hard environmental constraints that dictate what is physically or operationally impossible.
2. “Watching the Dark” (Patrick Hoverstadt & Ross Ashby)
Patrick Hoverstadt explicitly advises practitioners to investigate complexity by “Watching the Dark”.
- This involves observing “what might have happened but did not”.
- When a complex system faces a massive disturbance but fails to react chaotically, the absence of a reaction reveals the presence of a hidden constraint or a powerful homeostatic “governor” keeping the system locked in place (the “dog that didn’t bark”). By investigating the non-events, you map the invisible boundaries of the system’s stability.
3. “Constitutive Absence” (Terrence Deacon & Claude Shannon)
From an information and thermodynamics perspective, a system’s identity and biological function are actually defined by Constitutive Absence—what is prevented or missing.
- Because the natural universe trends toward entropy (maximum disorder and noise), a functioning system is defined by its ability to actively prevent that disorder.
- To investigate what a system does not do, you ask: “What normally occurs in this physical environment that has currently failed to occur?“. The absence of noise or the prevention of a highly probable event serves as direct evidence that the system is performing formal “work” to carve functional meaning out of chaos.
4. The “Un-Sent Message” (Gregory Bateson)
Gregory Bateson highlights that in the realm of living, communicative systems (Creatura), the absence of an event is itself a profound piece of information.
- Information is “a difference which makes a difference”. Therefore, “zero” (the absence of an action, like a letter not sent or a withheld response) can trigger massive systemic reactions.
- To investigate a system, you must look at what communication or feedback was withheld, as the lack of a signal often shapes human and ecological behavior just as powerfully as a direct command.
5. Boundary Critique and “The Witness” (C. West Churchman & Paul Cilliers)
If you are investigating what a human activity system does not do in an ethical or functional sense, you must examine its Boundary Judgments.
- A system boundary is an arbitrary choice that includes certain things and excludes others.
- By investigating what the system explicitly does not do, you identify the “witnesses” or marginalized victims—the people and environmental factors that are affected by the system but intentionally excluded from its benefits and design. You investigate the system’s “blind spots” to reveal the underlying values and power dynamics dictating its priorities.