Systems Thinking Theory

Devon Freeman

Professor Langlois

EMS: Open Systems Theory

22 September 2011

We can use systems thinking to clearly understand how processes interact with each other. Through this thinking we are able accept how complex natural systems tend to be as well recognized and understand that simultaneous processes may or may not be integrated with one another. In regards to analyzing the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we can use systems thinking to analyze the issue and accept the need for a team to attempt to solve this problem. We have to take into account the prevailing variables that are not so obvious in an incident such as this one. An explosion of an oil rig has underlying variables such as the combined pressure of gas, mud and oil expanding and setting fire. The switches that were supposed to prevent an explosion did not work, which is another underlying variable as well as the employees, the corporations involved and any government overseers.

In the structure of the open systems theory there is an input, throughput and output. Feedback is also involved by helping the system to adjust to conditions. In this case feedback must be determined to prevent an explosion like this from ever happening again. The input is the corporation’s investments, employees and plans that are involved in BP Oil Company. The throughput is the daily operations to drill oil from underground and the output is the oil retrieved or when incidents such as this one occur. Entropy is the amount of energy available for use to carry out this process. As a system goes through energy it is creating entropy. In this case entropy would be the oil spilling whereas the negative entropy (used to compensate for energy losses) would be fixing the pipeline.