Etapa 2: Modelación de la herramienta para asignación de personal

Experience teaches that what shows up as one person’s behavior may be a product of relationship. The same individual may be submissive in one relationship, dominant in another. Like so many qualities we attri- bute to individuals, submissiveness is only half of a two- part equation. In fact, family therapists use a host of concepts to describe how two people in a relationship contribute to what goes on between them, including pur- suer–distancer, overfunctioning–underfunctioning, and control–rebel cycles. The advantage of such concepts is that either party can change his or her part in the pat- tern. But while it’s relatively easy to discover themes in two-person relationships, it’s more difficult to see pat- terns of interaction in larger groups like families. That’s why family therapists found systems theory so useful.

Systems theory had its origins in the 1940s, when theoreticians began to construct models of the struc- ture and functioning of mechanical and biological units. What these theorists discovered was that things as diverse as jet engines, amoebas, and the human brain all share the attributes of a system—that is, an or- ganized assemblage of parts forming a complex whole. According to systems theory, the essential prop- erties of living systems arise from the relationships among their parts. These properties are lost when the system is reduced to isolated elements. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, from a systems perspective, it would make little sense to try to understand a child’s behavior by interviewing him or her without the rest of the child’s family.

Although some therapists use terms like systemic and systems theory to mean little more than considering

families as units, systems actually have a number of specific and interesting properties. To begin with, the shift from looking at individuals to considering the fam- ily as a system means shifting the focus to patterns of relationship.

Let’s take a simple example. If a father scolds his son, his wife tells him not to be so harsh, and the boy continues to misbehave, a systemic analysis would concentrate on this sequence, for it is this sequence of interaction that reveals how the system functions. To focus on inputs and outputs, a systems analysis delib- erately avoids speculating about individuals or asking why they do what they do. The most radical expres- sion of this systemic perspective was the black box metaphor:

The impossibility of seeing the mind “at work” has in recent years led to the adoption of the Black Box concept . . . applied to the fact that electronic hardware is by now so complex that it is some- times more expedient to disregard the internal structure of a device and concentrate on the study of its specific input–output relations. . . . This con- cept, if applied to psychological and psychiat- ric problems, has the heuristic advantage that no ultimately unverifiable intrapsychic hypotheses need be invoked and that one can limit oneself to observable input–output relations, that is, to com- munication. (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967, pp. 43–44)

Viewing people as black boxes may seem like the ul- timate expression of mechanistic thinking, but this metaphor had the advantage of simplifying the field of study by eliminating speculation about the mind in order to concentrate on people’s input and output (communication, behavior).

Among the features of systems seized on by early family therapists, few were more influential than homeostasis, the self-regulation that allows systems to maintain themselves in a state of dynamic balance. Don Jackson’s notion of family homeostasis emphasized that dysfunctional families’ tendency to resist change went a long way toward explaining why, despite heroic efforts to improve, so many patients remain stuck (Jackson, 1959). Today we look back on this emphasis on homeo- stasis as exaggerating the conservative properties of families and underestimating their resourcefulness.

Thus, although many of the cybernetic concepts used to describe machines could be extended by anal- ogy to human systems like the family, living systems, it turns out, cannot be adequately described by the same principles as mechanical systems.

■ General Systems Theory

In the 1940s, an Austrian biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, attempted to combine concepts from sys- tems thinking and biology into a universal theory of living systems—from the human mind to the global ecosphere. Starting with investigations of the endocrine system, he began extrapolating to more complex social systems and developed a model that came to be called general systems theory.

Mark Davidson, in his fascinating biography Un- common Sense (1983), summarized Bertalanffy’s defi- nition of a system as

any entity maintained by the mutual interaction of its parts, from atom to cosmos, and including such mundane examples as telephone, postal, and rapid transit systems. A Bertalanffian system can be physical like a television set, biological like a cocker spaniel, psychological like a person- ality, sociological like a labor union, or symbolic like a set of laws. . . . A system can be composed of smaller systems and can also be part of a larger system, just as a state or province is composed of smaller jurisdictions and also is part of a nation. (p. 26)

The last point is important. Every system is a sub- system of larger systems. But family therapists tended to forget about this spreading network of influence when they adopted the systems perspective. They treated the family as a system while ignoring the larger systems of community, culture, and politics in which families are embedded.

Bertalanffy used the metaphor of an organism for social groups, but an organism was an open system, continuously interacting with its environment. Open systems, as opposed to closed systems (e.g., machines), sustain themselves by exchanging resources with their surroundings—for example, taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. Another property of living

systems that mechanists forgot was that they don’t just react to stimuli; they actively initiate efforts to flourish.

Bertalanffy was a life-long crusader against the mechanistic view of living systems, particularly those living systems called people. He believed that, unlike machines, living organisms demonstrate equifinality, the ability to reach a final goal in a variety of ways.

With a mechanical system, there is a direct cause- and-effect relationship between the initial conditions and the final state. But in a biological or social sys- tem, like a family, final results may be achieved with different initial conditions and in different ways. Thus, there is never only one way to achieve a family’s objectives.

Living organisms are active and creative. They work to sustain their organization, but they aren’t motivated solely to preserve the status quo. In an open system, feedback mechanisms operate so that the system re- ceives information from the environment, which helps it adjust. For example, the cooling of the blood from a drop in environmental temperature stimulates centers in the brain to activate heat-producing mechanisms so that temperature is maintained at a steady level. Fam- ily therapists picked up on the concept of homeostasis, but, according to Bertalanffy, an overemphasis on this conservative aspect of the organism reduced it to the level of a machine: “If [this] principle of homeostatic maintenance is taken as a rule of behavior, the so-called well-adjusted individual will be [defined as] a well-oiled robot” (quoted in Davidson, 1983, p. 104).

Early systems models of the family were based on the concept of a closed system and emphasized the role of negative feedback in maintaining homeostatic equi- librium. Families are more aptly described, in Walter Buckley’s (1968) terms, as complex adaptive systems. Such systems are open and susceptible to significant changes in the nature of the components themselves with important consequences for the system as a whole. Their feedback control loops make possible not only self-regulation (as in homeostatic systems) but also self-direction, such that a system may mod- ify its structure in order to evolve. Unlike mechanical systems, which strive only to maintain a fixed struc- ture, family systems seek not only to remain stable but also to change when necessary to adapt to new cir- cumstances. Buckley coined the term morphogenesis to describe this elastic quality of adaptive systems.

To summarize, Bertalanffy brought up many of the issues that have shaped family therapy:

• A system as more than the sum of its parts • Emphasis on interaction within and among

systems versus reductionism

• Human systems as ecologic organisms versus mechanism

• Concept of equifinality

• Homeostatic reactivity versus spontaneous activity