By Anil Dash

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed.

The most effective and broadly-understand articulation of this idea is the phrase, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, often abbreviated as POSIWID. The term comes to us from the field of cybernetics, and the work of Stafford Beer, but this is one of those wonderful areas where you really don’t have to read a lot of theory or study a lot of the literature to immediately get value out of the concept. (Though if you have time, do dig into the decades of research here; you'll enjoy it!)

A potential negative aspect of understanding that the purpose of a system is what it does, is that we are then burdened with the horrible but hopefully galvanizing knowledge of this reality. For example, when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly.

Sit with it for a minute. If this makes you angry or uncomfortable, or repulses you, then you are understanding the concept correctly.