Curriculum Map

Systems Thinking

The Sciences of the Artificial. A capstone course organized around Herbert Simon's intellectual legacy. Bounded rationality, satisficing, organizational behavior, design science, and systems dynamics—synthesizing insights across all courses.

17 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

The Ant on the Beach

Herbert Simon's famous parable of the ant reveals a profound insight: the complexity we observe in behavior often reflects the complexity of the environment, not the complexity of the agent. This principle transforms how we understand minds, markets, and all adaptive systems.

2-3 weeks

Bounded Rationality

Classical economics assumed humans are perfectly rational optimizers. Herbert Simon showed this was empirically false and proposed an alternative: bounded rationality. Understanding the limits of human cognition transforms how we think about decision-making, markets, organizations, and policy.

2-3 weeks

Satisficing and Heuristics

If humans cannot optimize, what do we do instead? Simon's answer was satisficing: searching for solutions that are good enough. This unit explores the heuristics and rules of thumb that boundedly rational agents use to navigate a complex world, when they work, and when they fail.

2-3 weeks

Procedural vs. Substantive Rationality

Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics, then used his lecture to dismantle the field's core assumptions. His distinction between substantive and procedural rationality explains why good processes often matter more than optimal outcomes.

2-3 weeks

Uncertainty, Ignorance, and Surprise

The deepest form of uncertainty is not knowing what we do not know. Herbert Simon and Frank Knight developed frameworks for deciding under conditions where traditional probability calculus fails. Their insights illuminate decisions from pandemic response to venture capital to climate policy.

2-3 weeks

Markets and Organizations

If markets efficiently coordinate economic activity through prices, why do firms exist at all? Herbert Simon and Oliver Williamson provided complementary answers that explain when hierarchies outperform markets and why the employment relationship involves a distinctive form of authority.

2-3 weeks

Administrative Behavior

In 1947, a 31-year-old political scientist attacked the foundations of management theory. His insight—that organizations are best understood as decision-making systems, not command hierarchies—would transform our understanding of administration, earn a Nobel Prize, and reveal why bureaucracies so often fail.

2-3 weeks

The Architecture of Complexity

Two watchmakers set out to assemble thousand-piece watches. One used a hierarchical design and prospered; the other used a flat design and failed. This parable, introduced by Herbert Simon in 1962, reveals a profound truth about complexity: hierarchical systems survive while non-hierarchical ones do not.

2-3 weeks

Near-Decomposability and Modularity

You can replace your phone battery without redesigning the phone. You can study economics without understanding quantum physics. You can reform one government agency without restructuring the entire state. These mundane facts reveal a profound truth about complex systems: near-decomposability is what makes understanding, control, and design possible.

2-3 weeks

Natural Science vs. Design Science

Physics studies how matter behaves; engineering uses physics to create devices. What is the relationship between understanding the world as it is and creating the world as it might be? Herbert Simon argued that design is not merely applied science but a distinct form of knowledge with its own logic, methods, and epistemology.

2-3 weeks

Problem Spaces and Search

In 1956, Simon and Newell created Logic Theorist, a program that proved mathematical theorems not through understanding but through search. This breakthrough launched both artificial intelligence and cognitive science, revealing that problem solving could be understood as navigation through a space of possibilities.

2-3 weeks

Expertise and Pattern Recognition

A chess master glances at a board for five seconds and reconstructs the position perfectly. A novice remembers four or five pieces. Why? The answer revolutionized our understanding of human cognition and revealed that expertise is not about thinking harder but about seeing differently.

2-3 weeks

Attention as the Scarce Resource

In 1971, Herbert Simon told Congress that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. He was describing our world fifty years before it existed.

2-3 weeks

Feedback, Delays, and Control

Your thermostat is a feedback system. Add a thirty-minute delay and it oscillates wildly. Most real systems have delays. This explains a great deal.

2-3 weeks

Leverage Points and Intervention

Donella Meadows ranked leverage points from weak to strong. The interventions we debate most intensely are among the least powerful. Understanding why reveals something profound about systems and politics.

2-3 weeks

Synthesis: Seeing the Whole

The capstone unit integrates Herbert Simon's frameworks with system dynamics to analyze complex problems. Students demonstrate their systems thinking through substantial projects and reflective synthesis.

3-4 weeks

Case Study: When Binary Codes Collide

When political loyalty displaces institutional competence as the coupling mechanism between civilian authority and military readiness, the system loses its capacity to process threat signals at precisely the moment those signals intensify.

3-5 days

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.