The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Authors Tiantian Li; Hector E. Rodriguez-Simmonds
Year 2026
Publisher Systems (MDPI), 14(9), 1075
Kind of work article
Discipline Engineering
Secondary disciplines Cognitive Science
Reading level technical
Kind of engagement scholarly
Read it at the publisher 10.3390/systems14091075
This qualitative study focuses on how engineering technology students scope and make sense of complex problems. Systems thinking can help engineers address increasing complexity and uncertainty. Social factors including the culture of disengagement and socio/technical dualism hinder students’ holistic problem-solving approaches. In this study, we ask: How do participants conceptualize a wicked problem and the relationships within? Where and why do participants position themselves in relation to the problem? What social factors influence participants’ conceptualization of wicked problems and how? We conducted task-based interviews with sixteen engineering technology students working through a wicked problem. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. We found that students conceptualized the problem using two mental models: an interconnected iceberg model and a more linear tree model. Students positioned themselves differently in relation to stakeholders, ranging from collaborative equals to external decision-makers who engaged stakeholders in transactional ways. These differences were associated with students’ assumed decision-making power, lived experiences, and sociotechnical reasoning. We argue that systems thinking education should create learning experiences with emotional responses that encourage students to question their assumptions. We recommend future research to explore the relationship between sociotechnical systems thinking and cultural, disciplinary, and epistemological traditions to identify inhibitors, coping strategies, and leverage points, encouraging holistic problem-solving approaches.
A peer-reviewed qualitative study. Sixteen engineering technology students at a large U.S. university talked through an ill-defined "wicked problem" scenario in task-based interviews, and their transcripts were analyzed thematically using DSRP as the framework for what systems thinking is.
Identifies two dominant student mental models — an 'interconnected iceberg' that preserves complexity and a 'linear tree' that reduces it — and links students' self-positioning to assumed decision-making power and lived experience.
Two independent researchers adopt DSRP as their working definition of systems thinking, not as a passing citation. They build a coding table that operationalizes all four patterns (Table 1), citing the 2008 Evaluation and Program Planning papers, the 2015 SRBS paper, Systems Thinking Made Simple, and all four of the 2022 Systems papers. They then run their analysis through it.
The interesting part for the evidence base: the R pattern is what separated the two mental models. Students who produced the richer representation were not distinguishing more things, they were relating more of them. And the depth of P tracked with whether a student collapsed the social/technical dualism that engineering culture trains into them. That is DSRP doing analytic work in someone else's study, on someone else's data, and coming out with a result the authors did not have to strain for.
They also register a limit: they read DSRP as defining systems thinking in mainly cognitive terms, so they pair it with Hess's cognitive/affective empathy categories to reach the emotional side of systems inquiry. They frame this as making explicit something they take to be implicit in DSRP already — an extension, not a challenge.
Participants came from two engineering technology capstone courses in Fall 2024; some had received a systems thinking intervention that taught DSRP, some had not, but this paper is a secondary analysis that pools them and does not compare the groups. The task was an adapted version of Grohs's Abeesee village scenario — a remote town of 50,000 where many residents cannot afford winter heat and 27 people died the previous year. Students drew or described a representation of the village, worked toward a solution, then reflected. Analysis was reflexive thematic analysis, with field notes, video, participant-made drawings, and one-page narrative profiles per participant.
The authors note that all participants who assumed high decision-making power identified as men and all who explicitly claimed limited power identified as women, and that dualist reasoning clustered among white men — while stating plainly that with sixteen students they are not making a generalizable claim about gender. Their recommendations to educators center on building lived experiences that produce cognitive dissonance, since students who had been through something that contradicted their assumptions were the ones who integrated the social and technical.
Two independent researchers adopt DSRP as their working definition of systems thinking and build a coding table operationalizing all four patterns, then use it to analyze how sixteen engineering technology students reason through a wicked problem. They identify two dominant student mental models — an interconnected iceberg that preserves complexity and a linear tree that reduces it.
Patterns it shows D, S, R, P
Shows it makes a difference
Added 2026-09-06
How to cite this Tiantian Li; Hector E. Rodriguez-Simmonds (2026). Seeing the System, Positioning the Self: Engineering Students' Conceptualizations of Wicked Problems. Systems (MDPI), 14(9), 1075.