A Brief Introduction to Systematic Living

an even larger system of systems.

This is not to say that systems imply order. Nor do the terms “systemic” or “systematic”, although they are frequently used to suggest exactly that. Quite the opposite. There is an incredible amount of chaos that occurs at every scale, in both natural and man-made systems. Systems of any kind can be unpredictable, and take on a life of their own. One glimpse at the juggernaut of bureaucracy that is the U.S. federal government demonstrates this nicely without having to spend another breath proving the point…

I’ve been lucky enough in life to have been thrown into situations where it seemed I was always forced to reverse engineer a wide assortment of systems. Most people call these situations “problems”, and I did too for many years.

My first career began during the U.S. Army’s transition into the New Army of the post-Cold War era. I served for nearly a decade, stateside and overseas, participated in the administration of multi-national task forces under U.N. control, and built and managed the deployment facility for the USARPAC power projection platform. I learned, by trial and error, the ins and outs of the personnel management bureaucracy and how to design computer-based solutions for many problems. Contrary to popular belief, the military was not at all bleeding edge in its attempts at automating even basic office documents, much less complex processes. We still used primarily tally sheets, log books, and typewriters to run Division-level operations even in the mid 1990s. The shining exception to this was Microsoft Powerpoint. Our generals lived and breathed their battle theaters through an endless barrage of Powerpoint slideshow briefings.

My first Army Achievement Medal was award...

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...its Own Reward

Entity Relationship Mapping: What Software Teaches Us About Grammar

Cooperative Evolution as a Systemic Norm

Specialization vs. Generalization

Design with Perpetuality

Sweet Chaos

Design with Intentionality

This Cell Isn’t Big Enough for the Two of Us: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Preserving Hammurabi’s Palace

KISS

A LEGO™ in Every Pot

Entropic Economics 101

Two is One, One is None

Give Me My Damn Twinky!

Natural Rights vs. Human Rights

A Calendar for Every Season

Can’t a Squirrel Get a Nut?

Regulate Yourself

Of Mollison and Gall, Dawkins and Waal

The Lie of Dichotomy: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

When You Piss in the Global Wind, We All Get Wet

Works Cited

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection

http://systemic.permacultureuniversity.net/?p=3