So much systems thinking reduces difference to the same, connecting everything into one map of flows and balances. This is a result of the abstraction, the modelling and the dominance of the visual.

The point of thinking about things as systems is to see how each (sub)system is discrete, with not just its own components, but its own governing values, style and so ontology.

One (sub)system can be ‘loosely structurally coupled’ to another without there being anything in common or actually moving between each system.

These are the relations between ontologically distinct (sub)systems that make it nevertheless impossible to simply ‘flow’ ‘system’ change through the whole system. The job of change across a system still requires distinct changes to each and every subsystem.

Weak systems thinkers (often by designers looking for the next thing after Design Thinking and Co-Design) are hoping that a systems map is a theory of change when it is only a guide to all the many changes that need to be made to every subsystem.

That a customer must journey through many lands to get value must never mean that we think of all those lands as culturally uniform or even connected in any way

designers should probably only talk about (sociomaterial) practices rather than systems, so that they bring to systems thinking attention to the distinctly styled routine's that people-with-things enact that sustain any particular sub-system