An environmental fallacy is the blunder of ignoring the environment. Other examples of this fallacy include failing to see long-term implications because one is preoccupied by the short-term, winning battles but losing the war, as well as precisely and meticulously solving the wrong problem. You could describe these all as failing to see the bigger picture, but in systems we call that the environment. The significance of which is governed by the principle of openness.

Openness is the principle that open systems can only be understood in the context of their environment. This is because open systems are dependent on and co-determined by their context. Unlike a closed system that can function entirely based on its own internal structure and process, an open system interacts with and is inextricably linked with its environment. This environment is context. It represents the greater system of an embedded or open system.

Now, a simple question: which major human effort is devoted to our understanding of objective reality? The answer might be obvious, but consider this: it was founded on principles that deny the principle of openness and treat most things as closed systems.
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Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are all right in theory but that when it comes to practical matters circumstances compel us to compromise.
–John Dewey

John Dewey is talking about our natural tendency to generalize possibilities into win-lose conflicts of being. That is to say something is either X or Not X, a conflict treated as a dichotomy. He then points out that when we realize dichotomies don’t really represent reality, we move on to treat the conflict as more of a continuum; a non-binary dimension with shades of grey that let us settle somewhere between. Thus, win-lose becomes more along the lines of a 50-50 compromise.

The problem with compromise is that it’s usually a give-and-take struggle. If the forces of each pole are strong it ends up being an extremely unstable mixture. The conflict still exists, you’re just trying to work around it. Ideally you’d remove the conflict all together, creating a win-win situation. This is what Ackoff described as “separately infeasible parts making a feasible whole.”

Say you have two competing tendencies: A vs B. It seems an unstated assumption that you can only have one or the other. The alternative is to struggle with a compromise, or you can look at it differently. Using multidimensionality, we can take the previously understood “or” relationship and suggest further possibilities, including a complementary “and” relationship as illustrated below:
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There are five principles of systems that we need to understand as the building blocks for our journey to systems thinking and design. This post is about multidimensionality, which is maybe the most potent of those principles, but also the least obviously “systemic” of them. In other words, I think it’s a great place to start.

I have a story to explain this principle involving two systems scientists, C. West Churchman and Russell Ackoff. It takes place at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. The two colleagues were heavily interested in the personality trait work of Carl Jung, particularly being introverted or extroverted. To explore the idea, they decided to test some students for the trait.

They first learned that there were several tests to determine whether a person was introverted or extroverted. They got copies of each and gave them to a sample of graduate students. Strangely, the different tests gave inconsistent results. Some would score introverts on one test and extroverts on another test. Were the tests flawed?
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