The Skeptical Systemist

In 1661, Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist, a work in which he surveyed the received paradigms of his day, showed what each had produced and where each had reached its limit, and proposed a different starting point. He did not announce a definitive taxonomy of individual elements or other systematic chemical solution. Instead, he offered a methodological position, grounding it in a rigorous experimental approach rooted in a mechanical philosophy, and introducing a definition for an element wherein it cannot be further broken down by chemical means. Over the next century, his work laid the foundation for the development of modern chemistry. Given that Boyle's adopted posture proved sufficient to shift an entrenched paradigm, the title of this series pays deliberate homage, aspiring to the approach while awaiting the outcome.

The competing paradigms available to Boyle shared something their authors had not quite articulated: they all began from stipulated assumptions about the key explanatory variable and approached their subject from the outside. Boyle occupied a different position: more disciplined about letting observation drive, less committed to pre-loaded assumptions, and genuinely uncertain whether external observation fully captured the nature of substances. Working at the frontier of what his era's intellectual infrastructure could support, he instinctively reached toward something that did not yet exist as a category: an empirically verified law.

Remarkably, we find ourselves in a structurally similar position with respect to systems theory today. The prevailing paradigms (and there are many, each productive in its own domain) have produced genuine insight and real results, yet have not converged on a unified theoretical foundation. Without known exception, the prevailing paradigms stipulate assumptions on the explanatory variables; nearly all approach their subject from the outside. A theory rigorous enough to apply across domains without re-deriving principles from scratch in each new application remains elusive — a gap the field has long recognized.^1,2

What this moment calls for, if the parallel holds, is someone working from a different position entirely: someone more disciplined about letting observation drive, less committed to pre-loaded assumptions, and genuinely uncertain whether external observation fully captures the nature of systems — a skeptical systemist.

The question naturally follows: why us, and why now? After all, the community has no shortage of talent, rigor, or ambition. For decades we asked questions, pressed on foundations, and received unsatisfying answers that amounted to "that's just the way things are" or "that's not possible." When the dissonance became impossible to ignore, we investigated rather than simply accepting what we were told. To our knowledge, no one had asked the most basic question of all and pursued it without presupposition: how do you know what makes a system a system? We soon realized we could not locate an existing framework that did not assert an answer by stipulated convention (e.g., that a system is defined by its components, boundaries, and behavior) rather than deriving it from anything intrinsically and universally true. Meanwhile, the prevailing paradigms, like in Boyle's day, have so thoroughly obscured the necessity of a different starting point that the field's own retrospectives have raised doubt about whether a unified theoretical foundation is even plausible. Nearly a decade ago we published an invitation to the community to question what it had long taken for granted³ … and waited to see who might take it up. Understandably, our invitation went unrecognized. And given the observed depth and pervasiveness of the field's entrenched assumptions, we feel we must step forward with what we initially tripped over and have since come to understand.

We came from complementary directions. One arrived through an engineering program that demanded rigor, systematic thinking, and a habit of questioning assumptions — followed by doctoral research into how and why systems change, and enough time inside the standard frameworks to develop a sense that the rapidly increasing complexity experienced by the field pointed to an invalid yet implicitly assumed foundation. The other arrived through decades of concept-through-operation practice, with an intuition that cut against the conventional view: that the only requirements that truly matter are quality attributes, and that accurately understanding what a system needs requires occupying the system's own viewpoint.

Our convergence happened providentially. We had been tasked to solve a particularly challenging problem — one that, when properly understood, required answering a question the prevailing frameworks could not reach from where they stood: what must be true of every system, prior to any presupposition of what a system is? To our surprise, we discovered we each held an interlocking half of the same key.

What that key unlocked sparked an abrupt paradigm shift in our thinking, knocking us out of the conventional orbit and creating a gulf between where we found ourselves and where everyone else lived. We began the arduous process of attempting to capture and communicate what we saw, developing terms and sketching out patterns, all the while continuing to work in the world we had just conceptually departed. Since our daily work still operated on the assumptions we had left behind, our colleagues rightly felt puzzled as the gap between us seemingly widened faster than we could bridge it.

We successfully applied our new thinking just enough to earn an invitation to submit a chapter for a planned book on transdisciplinary perspectives on complex systems. We made our first attempt at describing the gap we had inadvertently crossed, examining the core assumption underlying the standard definition of systems and making the case that this assumption generates systematic and predictable breakdowns in the regimes where it matters most. We committed to our reviewers to develop the theoretical foundations of the alternative we proposed.

A period of application followed, across domains, problems, and organizations, each engagement sharpening our conviction and deepening our understanding of what we had stumbled across. Time has also brought something even more valuable: maturity in our approach, clarifying how to bridge the gap so others can follow.

This series is intended to be that bridge, fulfilling our commitment.

We now present our work in the spirit of scientific inquiry, searching out what is true and making it useful. Those who come with that same orientation — skeptical, rigorous, and open to what the evidence shows, wherever it leads — are exactly who this series is written for.

We turned the key. What it unlocked illuminates why the seventy-year search for a unified, domain-agnostic theoretical foundation has not converged despite everything the field has brought to bear. The Series begins there.