ABSTRACT
One reason why social workers, therapists, and social policy-makers should benefit from basic knowledge in systems theory is that to a large extent their profession is about intervention, guidance, and support. Almost everywhere, the targets of interventions are systems. Things such as the consciousness, the family, the economy, politics, science, religion, the church, social media, the classroom, and small-talk at the coffee break are all examples of systems. Social and psychic systems are emergent orders that behave according to self-referential, unpredictable and non-linear logics. In contrast to automats and simple mechanic systems, social and psychic systems are non-trivial machines. Trivial machines are deterministic, which means that they can be defined analytically. Once we know the input and output, we can reconstruct the mechanism in the machine and predict its activities, and this is a prerequisite for linear steering.
