The reason that systems theory is of interest to us is that it describes systems in terms of relationships – and relationship has huge importance in our work with people in distress.
Scientists, sociologists and philosophers are all interested in systems theory and its applications are both widespread, and with the world shrinking, increasingly relevant to us all.
For example I mentioned in the Introduction that one of the things that influenced me to change my thinking on the world (and what I wanted to do with my life) was reading the magazine Resurgence in the mid 1980’s. It was in this magazine that I first came across James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis which proposed that the Earth was a living organism, and every part of it influences, and is influenced by, every other part. This, I found fascinating and even though it was quite novel at the time it is now widely accepted.
Of course, like many modern studies, an intuitive understanding of systems theory has been with us as long as mankind has been in existence.
It could actually be argued that ancient peoples, who seemed to have an appreciation of the inter-relatedness of all living things, were far more in tune with, and appreciated the importance of systems, than our current technological world.
So like many similar phenomena that are ‘discovered’, the Gaia type thinking has actually been with us in many different cultures for thousands of years but was largely forgotten about in our rush to modernise our world over the past 300 years or so.
I will say a lot more about this in the Chapter on Research and Evaluation.