When engaging with complex challenges, it’s important to define the boundaries of your system of interest—the specific challenge or phenomenon you want to understand—and its surrounding environment—everything that interacts with your system of interest across its boundaries.
Defining boundaries is not merely an administrative or technical task—it is an important conceptual and strategic act. It provides added clarity, focus, and manageability to effectively embrace and navigate complex challenges:
- It can prevent confusion by ensuring a common understanding of the system of interest.
- It helps with managing expectations—when all stakeholders understand the boundaries of a system, expectations for change share a common scope.
- Defining the boundaries of a system can help with understanding roles and responsibilities for working with it.
Peter Checkland (2000) notes that defining boundaries helps with the process of inquiry—boundaries become a tool of thought, facilitating a learning orientation for those working with the system of interest. Werner Ulrich (2002) points out that the ways we define boundaries reflect our own worldviews; defining boundaries helps us to learn not just about the system, but about our own notions of motivation, power, knowledge, and legitimacy, turning the system itself into a tool of reflexive inquiry.
Deeper Dive
- Bar-Yam, Y. Making Things Work: Solving complex problems in a complex world. NECSI Knowledge Press, 2004. ISBN 0-9656328-2-2.
- Ulrich, W. Assessing assumptions about boundaries with critical systems heuristics, 2002.
- Checkland, P. Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17: S11-58, 2000.
Related Frameworks
- Zoom In, Zoom Out: illustrates importance of considering level of magnification when defining boundaries