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Seeing Systems: A Conceptual Resource

Ned O'Gorman, Jessica Robinson, Paul McKean, Matt Pitchford, Mary Grace Hebert, Ned Prutzer, Sally Jackson, Jessica Landau, Jeffrey Proulx, Melissa Seifert, Natalie Lambert, Kristina Williams, Gabe Malo, elizaBeth Simpson, Fabian Prieto-Nanez, Nikki Weickum, Kevin Hamilton, Authors

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Component

Components are the units or entities that make up a system (Poole, XX). Components can be people, groups, departments, organizations, etc. Components that are connected by relationships are in a network. When the connections between components produce a pattern of behavior over time, the components are part of a system (Meadows, 2008). The behavior over time of a system or its components is called dynamics.

The relationships between the components of a system can be analyze using network analysis. In this case, all components must be of the same entity type, for example, all components could be organizations. The components will be referred to as nodes during network analysis, and the relationships between nodes are called edges or links. Below you can see a network analysis visualization of a system composed of components that are people.

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