New Book: A System Thinker's View of Description and Reality

I’m happy to announce the publication of Graham Berrisford’s second book - exclusive for the Cyb3rSyn Community! His latest book is titled “A Systems Thinker’s View of Description and Reality” and can be downloaded for free by all the community-tier members. This is book 4 (out of 8) for the year - please find the latest Cyb3rSyn Community publication schedule here.

Graham has been thinking and writing about these ideas for a couple of decades and continuously iterates on the content based on the feedback from various avenues including LinkedIn.

For this book, we experimented with a new feedback mechanism by giving early access to the chapters of this book to our community-tier members. My hearty thanks to the community members that provided feedback and congratulations to Graham on his second book - I look forward to working with him on his next two.

I’ll randomly pick one existing subscriber of the newsletter and one from all new subscribers that start from today (June 1st 2025) until the end of the month. The winners will be picked early next month and I’ll send them a free copy of Graham’s latest e-book.

Today’s guest post is an excerpt from the preface of the new book in which Graham explains the background, journey and motivation for the book.

What is this book about? Science? It takes a scientific viewpoint of the matters to follow. Philosophy? It is relevant to some philosophical issues or debates. Epistemology? It takes a psycho-biological view of how we know what we know. Semiotics? It is concerned with symbols, words and diagrams and how we use them to communicate knowledge, but it is not linguistics.

The book is a systems thinker’s view of epistemology and semiotics. Readers who are steeped in those domains of knowledge may consider it naïve, but I hope it will also prompt them to reflect on, and perhaps shift their view of some matters.

I became interested in how we describe reality when studying for a degree in psychology at Leeds university, where I learnt that the brain holds a model (or several models) of the world around it.

Now and then, after midnight, I watched lectures broadcast from The Open University, including a course on systems. From this and other sources I became aware that a farm and a shipyard can be encapsulated and described using a general input-process-output model. I became aware of general system theory, and the theorem that every good regulator (be it biological or mechanical) holds a model of what it regulates.

Since graduation, my career has been much about modeling human and computer activity systems that create, use and depend on information. I worked first as a programmer; then a teacher of program design; then a consultant for an industry analyst business; then a database project team lead for a utility company; then a consultant in systems analysis and design for companies that sold services and tools for that; then a best practice manager for an international systems integrator. Today, I work for my own company, teaching courses to enterprise and solution architecture certificates from the British Computer Society and The Open Group.

My courses cover the core concepts of ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard on the architectural description of systems. This standard contains concept graph which includes a curious a triadic model that relates

I know what a working system is, and what a documented description of a system is. How does an architecture differ from both? Many years ago, I asked an editor of the standard. The editor replied that an AD documents the architecture of a system. That sounded like word salad to me.

I asked: Is that architecture in somebody’s head? (Our mental models are fragmentary, fragile and forgettable.) The AD is far more complete and detailed than any of us can remember and recall. And if the architecture is neither documented, nor in any anybody’s head, then where is it?

He said the architecture is a Platonic ideal. I said surely that is an ethereal, undetectable, undescribable, and redundant concept? It became clear we took different philosophical positions on what is called “the problem of universals”.

In 2011, I was invited to a meeting of “systems thinkers” and was surprised to find how widely the term system is used as a synonym for a human organization, institution or society, in the fields of management science and organization theory.

Inspired to looking deeper into the works of Ackoff, Ashby and other luminaries, I was struck by how different their views of a system are. And how some of those differences emerge from different views of what it means to describe reality, and different philosophical positions.

This book presents an overview of many (not all) ways we describe the world. It does not require any particular scientific knowledge. It is not based on physics or mathematics. It touches only lightly on the topics of predicate and propositional logic. It is not based on linguistics. The viewpoint is more psycho-biological, starting from the idea that our (informal and imperfect) human languages evolved because they enhanced what all social animals do by way of remembering descriptions of things and communicating with each other.

The book takes that story forwards. It discusses how we describe things by symbolizing, likening, categorizing and relating them. It explores different ways to describe things, from pairing tokens with type definitions, to large and complex knowledge structures. It discusses causality, determinism and free will. In the end, it returns to “the problem of universals” that triggered me to assemble these topics into a world view that I believe to be consistent with the evolution of life on earth, and human thinking.

The Cyb3rSyn Community is an online community that brings together systems thinkers, cyberneticians and philosophers along with Tech. practitioners and executives. Grab four free books along with loads of other premium content - newsletter, online training, podcasts, online chat and forums, mobile apps and more. Upgrade to the community-tier with a 50% discount.

Checkout Graham’s latest LinkedIn post for more context about this book (and next) and also connect with him.