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- Self-organization is a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.
- Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties.
- Steady state is a more general situation than Dynamic equilibrium. If a system is in steady state then the recently observed behaviour of the system will continue into the future. In stochastic systems, the probabilities that various states will be repeated will remain constant.
- Strong emergence is a type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
- Subsystem: A major component of a system. It is made up of two or more interacting and interdependent components. Subsystems of a system interact in order to attain their own purpose(s) and the purpose(s) of the system in which they are embedded.
- Suprasystem: The entity that is composed of a number of component systems organized in interacting relationships in order to serve their embedding suprasystem.
- Sustainability: The ability of a system to maintain itself with no loss of function for extended periods of time. In human terms it is the creative and responsible stewardship of resources — human, Management natural, and financial — to generate stakeholder value while contributing to the well-being of current and future generations of all beings.
- Synchrony: Also synchronicity. In engineering; concurrence of periods and/or phases; simultaneity of events or motions: contemporaneous occurrences. In evolutionary systems thinking; a fortunate coincidence of phenomenon and/or of events.
- Synergy: Also system. Synergy is the process by which a system generates emergent properties resulting in the condition in which a system may be considered more than the sum of its parts, and equal to the sum of its parts plus their relationships. This resulting condition can be said to be one of synergy.
- Syntony: In evolutionary systems thinking; evolutionary consonance; the occurrence and persistence of an evolutionarily tuned dynamic regime. Conscious intention aligned with evolutionary purpose; more loosely, the embodiment and manifestation of conscious evolution; a purposeful creative aligning and tuning with the evolutionary flows of one’s milieu. In traditional radio engineering; resonance.
- Syntropy The process of negentropy-importation. A syntropic system is a dissipative structure.
- Systems design A decision-oriented disciplined inquiry that aims at the construction of a model that is an abstract representation of a future system.
- Soft Systems Methodology:
Read more about this topic: Glossary Of Systems Theory