Ago-antagonistic systems approach

Today's engineers are confronted with the concept of "complexity" and, in order to explore it in greater depth, they need to supplement their working methodologies with those found in "systems science".

In this section, J. F. Vautier insists on the need to take into account a plurality of viewpoints when characterizing a "system". That's why we'll be making particular reference to a branch of this science known as "ago-antagonistic systems science" (AASS), which began to develop in the field of biomedical research, but was soon taken over by the field of management and business organization in the humanities and social sciences.

The principle is to identify couples in one of these systems, formerly known as opposition couples, which enable us to reconstruct the edifice of a system, with an identical type of dynamic at each level and throughout the system as a whole. The consequence is that new possibilities for action are opened up — for managers, engineers, economists, sociologists and biomedical specialists —, who can correct the global imbalances observed in the systems they are responsible for: they will then only be able to choose a small number of impacts for their strategies, despite the complexity of the system; moreover, the SSAA lays the foundations for what we will define as "paradoxical strategies", notably bipolar, or even paradoxical unipolar.

Some brief illustrations of bipolar strategies :

• the couples flexibility/social justice; globalization/safeguarding local identities; (economic)deregulation/regulation, are the subject of debates in which the absence of knowledge, if not sometimes intuitive, of the ago-antagonistic dynamic makes it difficult to progress in the search for strategic solutions: the choice of a preferential pole is in fact often a factor of failure;

• forming an ago-antagonistic couple from local territorial authorities and central (prefectoral) power would enable the sometimes conflicting relations between these structures to be more often creative (according to Lucien Mehl, Honorary State Councillor).

Two examples of paradoxical unipolar strategies:

• the Guingamp regional train was in deficit; rather than abolishing it, we increased its frequency, thus initially worsening the deficit; but this change restored financial equilibrium due to the increase in passenger numbers;

• to combat pollution in the forest of Fontainebleau, a member of the ONF staff, interviewed on television, announced that the removal of garbage cans in one sector of the forest had been accompanied by a reduction in pollution...