"The heart of the concept of systems thinking is that the behavior of a system is an emergent property of its structure, not its parts. Problem symptoms are emergent behaviors. Each symptom can be traced to particular aspects of the structure. It follows that if you don't know the structure of a complex social system problem, then you will be unable to solve the problem except by trial and error. For difficult problems this is impossible." -twink.org glossary definition of emergent behavior