System Existence Theory
A Transformation Management Institute Research Program
System Existence Theory specifies the conditions under which system is an admissible unit of analysis at a stated boundary under a declared interaction regime.
Program Overview
System Existence Theory addresses a prior question to all system modeling, diagnosis, or explanation: when does a system exist as an individuated unit at all, rather than merely being treated as one by convention?
SET defines the requirements a candidate unit must satisfy in order to be treated coherently as a system at a stated boundary. These requirements constrain usage. They do not describe mechanisms, functions, behaviors, or outcomes.
Where systemhood is not admissible at a given boundary, downstream claims about behavior, control, performance, responsibility, or interpretation are not incorrect but ill posed, because no stable unit of analysis is available to bear those claims.
SET governs systemhood admissibility. It does not govern behavior, optimization, control-theoretic regulation, meaning, or interpretation.
Scope and Limits of Application
System Existence Theory applies only to questions of ontological admissibility. It specifies when it is coherent to treat a candidate unit as a system at a stated boundary under a declared interaction regime, and when it is not.
SET applies before any analysis that assumes a system already exists. It constrains whether system claims are well formed. It does not evaluate how systems behave, how well they funaction, or how they ought to be designed.
What SET governs
Whether a candidate unit qualifies as a system at a stated boundary
Whether an inside–outside distinction is maintainable under the declared interaction regime
Whether boundary maintenance is attributable to processes located inside the stated boundary
Whether continuity and unit identity persist across the declared time window
What SET does not govern
Behavior, performance, or outcomes
Function, purpose, or optimization
Mechanisms of control-theoretic regulation, feedback design, or stability engineering
Meaning, interpretation, credibility, or decision procedures
Where these conditions are not satisfied, the appropriate response is not correction or optimization, but boundary revision, regime revision, or category withdrawal for the purposes of analysis.
From the TMI Research Library
The program’s defining publication.
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889.
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Featured with The Conditions of System Existence as boundary persistence under disturbance: structure becomes legible only where distinction and continuity survive interaction.
Foundational Paper
The Conditions for System Existence
January 2026
This paper specifies the conditions under which a system can be treated as a system at all. It shows why many failures attributed to dysfunction or poor design originate earlier, at the level of boundary and unit admissibility. Read this if you want to understand when system claims are coherent, and when they are ill posed from the start.
Relationship to Other System Frameworks
System Existence Theory (SET) does not replace established system frameworks. It targets a prior condition those frameworks typically presume: that the proposed unit is actually admissible as a system at the stated boundary under the declared interaction regime.
SET therefore does not compete with general systems theory, systems engineering, cybernetics, control theory, or complexity frameworks. It constrains when their system claims are well formed. Where systemhood is inadmissible at a proposed boundary, adding more variables or better mechanisms does not repair the analysis. The unit of analysis is not available at that boundary.
SET is compatible with downstream system sciences. It is upstream of them.
→ View the Theory in Context
From the TMI Essential Reading List:
Two foundational books for system existence
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General System Theory
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968)
Bertalanffy provides the conceptual bridge from parts to organized relations: why system behavior depends on architecture, coupling, and boundary maintenance rather than local optimizations. Structural Coherence uses that lineage to treat interpretive reliability as an engineered property of interfaces and decision pathways. In practice, coherence failures show up as stable contradictions across forums, discontinuities in authority routing, and incompatible closure rules across time.
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Order Out of Chaos
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984)
Prigogine and Stengers formalize how irreversible processes generate time-directional change and how systems produce order under nonequilibrium conditions. We draw on that lineage when treating Drift as a rate: misalignment accumulates through repeated events when correction mechanisms cannot keep pace with system pressures. The relevance is conceptual and diagnostic: drift is not “error,” it is an observable dynamic across event series.
Institute Stewardship
The Transformation Management Institute™ stewards a scientific canon organized around three research programs: the General Theory of Interpretation (GTOI), System Existence Theory (SET), and Transformation Science. Each program is independently governed and defines its own scope, terminology, and publication pathway.
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