The emergence of the systems perspective represented a fundamental shift in the dominant metaphor for talking about both the natural and the social world. For three centuries prior to systems theory, the dominant explanatory metaphor had been the machine—the idea that everything in the universe can be understood mechanically. Starting in the 17th century, the ambition of the newly emerging sciences was to control, predict, and conquer nature.

Everything in the universe—both natural and human—could be reduced to causal, linear relationships. In this model, humans and animals were seen as nothing more than elaborate mechanical beings that could be understood through dissection and examination of their individual parts. In an organizational context, Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management are the best realization of this mechanistic, reductionist model.

Taylor analyzed work by breaking it down into its basic, irreducible elements and then redesigning these elements into the one best way. In this sense, his methods were both deterministic and reductionist. And like the parts in a machine, workers could easily be replaced without affecting organizational efficiency. Similarly, Max Weber viewed organizations from this Newtonian, mechanical perspective, seeing them as stable bureaucratic structures that ideally functioned independently from the human office holders who occupied them.

The emergence of the systems perspective challenges all these assumptions about the way the world works. The systems approach recognizes the role of the human observer in constructing the reality around us. In this sense, the world is not something out there, operating independently from us. Moreover, how we perceive the world has a profound effect on how we act toward it.