So if the first rule of systems is that everything is connected to everything else, the second rule is: You can optimize individual pieces only up to a point.  If you don't scrap the old system and put a new system in place, ultimately everything you do will be constrained.  But if you put together a new system, and you do it right, everything starts to get better.  The new system ends up benefiting many individual pieces, as well as the whole.  As Rose puts it: 'Optimizing individual components can only lead to incremental change; optimizing the system can lead to a transformational ecology.

• systems theory
• the fourth way
• will
• change