The announcement that National City was being acquired by PNC Bank happened towards the end of October, 2008.  It was many months before the signs on the local branches where I live changed, and not until the third weekend in February, 2010 that the online banking system switched to PNC.  So basically, PNC had about 16 months to get ready for the switchover.  Since then, it’s hard to believe or explain how many ways they have failed.  (Admittedly, this is only person’s experience, but you can’t have this many problems just by accident.)

Convergences are always interesting.  In the last two days I’ve been dealing with issues about location, identity and security, and thinking about how these related to questions of service.

I am currently less than 200 miles from my home, in Louisville, for a few days.  When I tried to use my Visa card at a Kroger grocery store (a large, regional chain) it was denied – because my location was recognized by the fraud department as “out of the ordinary.”  When I called the credit card’s customer service number I was first put through a long series of questions to verify my identity (as usual), and then told that several things had triggered the denial, but most importantly it was the location.

Aside from all of the personal reasons that people do or don’t like President Barack Obama, his choice (or willingness, or apparent need) to intervene in systems at the highest levels has caused great consternation.  Conservatives seem to see this as inappropriate or unnecessary government intervention.  Liberals have been more supportive, but mostly about the expansion of services to the under-served, which could have been done in other ways without such large-scale change.  So why take on such large and complex issues?  Why not simply work incrementally with existing programs, as suggested by some in Washington?

The principles of laissez-faire capitalism are clear that government should not control business.  This leads some people to think that government should have no involvement in business at all; that there is, or should be, a clear, bright line separating them.  Obviously, that can’t happen.  There is a constant dance about how they interact in terms of the total economy, but they are always interdependent.  The debates being waged in Washington just indicate how complex this relationship is, and may indicate large shifts in the forces that balance them.

The idea that people hold “mental models” of the world may seem trivial or obvious, or both.  Everyone has a way of seeing the world, affected by the cultures and the families in which we were raised, our own experiences, our personalities, and so on.  Mostly, they account for our individual differences; why some of us are conservative and others liberal; some more optimistic and others pessimistic; some risk-taking and others more reserved and cautious.

The question of the “reality” of systems can quickly devolve into a philosophical battle about the nature of reality itself.  Much of the answer for systems research depends upon how you define the system – as to whether it refers to the things that you are trying to learn about, or the process that you are using to investigate.

How do you choose what you want to study – or learn more about, or better understand, or solve?  In systems work, this entails the drawing of a boundary.  The boundary separates what is to be examined from what is to be excluded.  It defines the question or the problem.  While this may seem patently simple, it is both the most fundamental step in a learning process, and the most complicated.

I have been struggling for years now with issues about systems.  First, how do you introduce the basic principles of systems to students, or other people who are interested but have no previous background?  There have been many different books and articles written at different levels, for different audiences, but (for me) all of them still leave questions or create additional confusion about what is really different about understanding things in terms of systems.

I have reconstructed this blog, at least for now, to test some of my own ideas about systems and the ways in which I understand them.  Comments, questions, retorts, and alternate views are welcome.

This WordPress installation was installed and configured by David Ing, as he wrote the instructions on the Coevolving Innovations blog.