System Existence Theory
A Transformation Management Institute Research Program
System Existence Theory (SET) specifies when a proposed unit may be treated as an admissible system object
under declared interaction regimes and time windows. It governs system claims before interpretation, diagnostics, transformation work, or performance analysis. Systemhood is treated as a conditional classification, not a default assumption.
Why this theory exists
The word system is used constantly across science, technology, management, and governance. It is rarely demonstrated.
Organizations, platforms, markets, and technologies are analyzed as systems without explicit declaration of boundary, identity, or persistence conditions. When those conditions are implicit or unstable, downstream work becomes incoherent. Disagreement persists even among competent actors because the unit itself cannot support the claims being made about it.
SET addresses this failure by requiring systemhood to be stated and tested.
What SET does
SET determines whether a proposed unit is admissible as a system object under declared conditions.
A system claim is admissible only when the following are explicitly specified:
what is inside and outside the boundary
the interaction regime the unit is expected to remain coherent under
the time window over which identity is claimed
the perturbations relevant to testing persistence
the criteria that define “the same system” across time
any scaffolding required to maintain stability
SET returns a regime-relative classification: admissible, conditionally admissible, inadmissible, or indeterminate.
Indeterminate is a valid scientific outcome.
What SET does not do
SET does not define meaning.
SET does not model behavior or performance.
SET does not evaluate moral claims.
SET does not prescribe interventions or governance actions.
SET governs whether such analyses are well-posed.
Core Structure
SET is organized into three layers.
Admissibility and individuation
Determines whether a proposed unit qualifies as a system object at all.Viability and constraint
Specifies what admissible systems must do to persist under uncertainty and cost. This layer introduces the Law of Constraint Dominance.System class partition
Distinguishes non-interpretive systems from interpretive systems to prevent category error and gate downstream analysis.
Governing laws
Law of Systemic Separability
A proposed unit qualifies as an admissible system object only if it can be individuated as a separable unit whose identity persists across a declared regime and time window under the declared perturbation class.Law of Constraint Dominance
When the cost of non-commitment exceeds the cost of commitment, admissible systems must collapse degrees of freedom in order to persist.
How SET fits the canon
SET supplies admissible system objects and declared conditions.
Interpretive frameworks apply only after admissibility is established. Binding is treated downstream as the interpretive instantiation of constraint dominance. Transformation science, diagnostics, and standards all presuppose a stable system object; SET governs whether that presupposition holds.
From the TMI Research Library
The program’s defining publications
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889.
© The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Featured with The Conditions of System Existence: systemhood becomes admissible only where boundary distinction and unit identity persist under interaction across a declared time window.
Foundational Paper
The Conditions of System Existence
January 2026
This paper specifies the conditions under which a proposed unit can be treated as an admissible system object under declared conditions. 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 determine when system claims are coherent, and when they are ill-posed from the start.
Barnett Newman, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, 1966–1970.
© Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Featured with The Law of Constraint Dominance: system behavior is governed by the dominant constraint; non-binding changes do not alter outcomes until it is relieved.
Foundational Paper
The Law of Constraint Dominance
January 2026
This paper explains how behavior in admissible systems is governed by binding constraints rather than intent or design. It shows why many interventions fail by acting on non-dominant factors, and why outcomes change only when the governing constraint is relieved.
Read this if you want to identify what actually limits system behavior and when change is structurally possible.
From the TMI Essential Reading List
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General System Theory
Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968)
Bertalanffy helped establish systems thinking as a cross-domain orientation toward organized relations rather than isolated parts. For SET, the relevance is upstream: systems language requires a defensible unit. This work provides historical context for why boundary and coupling assumptions matter, even when a system–environment partition is treated as given.
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Order Out of Chaos
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984)
Prigogine and Stengers analyze irreversible processes and the emergence of order under nonequilibrium conditions. For SET, the relevance is not a theory of transformation or drift, but a boundary reminder: many candidate “systems” exist only as temporary, regime-dependent individuations. This work helps situate why unit identity can be stable in one regime and inadmissible in another.
Institute Stewardship
The Transformation Management Institute stewards a scientific canon organized around four research programs: System Existence Theory (SET), Physics of Becoming (POB), the General Theory of Interpretation (GTOI), and Transformation Science. Each program defines its own scope, terminology, and publication sequence.
The Institute publishes this work as an open-access scientific resource, operates independently of commercial activity, and protects certain names and marks to prevent misrepresentation of official terminology and standards without restricting use of the underlying scientific concepts.
Publications are versioned over time and support the Institute’s applied standards and professional disciplines.