[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/)

# DSRP vs LoSC

## Details

**Authors** Mann

**Year** 2018

**Publisher** The TRIZ Journal

**Kind of work** article, magazine

**Discipline** Engineering

**Secondary disciplines** Systems Science

**Reading level** intermediate

**Kind of engagement** public

**Applied** false

[Read it](https://the-trizjournal.com/dsrp-vs-losc/)

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

Mann read Systems Thinking Made Simple on a colleague's recommendation because DSRP looked to him like it conflicted with TRIZ's Law of System Completeness, and set out to work through whether the two frameworks can be reconciled.

### How they did it (methods)

A conceptual comparison. Mann takes the Cabreras' four rules as stated in the book, then asks whether each maps onto one of the six elements the Law of System Completeness says any working system must have: Engine, Transmission, Tool, Interface, Sensors, and Coordination.

### What they found (results)

Concludes DSRP captures 'essential elements of the Systems-Thinking story' but fails the Law of System Completeness — lacking meaningful Interface and Sensor components — and that 'DSRP has a lot more to learn from TRIZ than the other way around', while crediting the identity–other move as useful on wicked problems.

## Commentary

### In short

Argues against DSRP by mapping all four patterns onto TRIZ's Law of System Completeness to test whether the framework covers the elements a complete system requires.

### In more detail

This is a comparison written from inside another tradition, by someone with no stake in DSRP and an obvious stake in TRIZ. The useful part is that Mann does the mapping work rather than dismissing the framework: he assigns each of the four rules to a position in the Law of System Completeness and says where each assignment is clean and where it is partial. The two gaps he names are specific enough to argue with. Interface, in his usage, is the part of a system that meets the outside world and the problem being worked on, and his charge is that DSRP has nothing for it and that the Cabreras' writing does not treat context as essential. Sensors is the part that measures whether the process is getting anywhere. His criticisms of the book itself are harsher than his criticisms of the framework, and they run to the practitioner's complaint that there are no worked cases.

### Response

Mann objects that DSRP-484 lacks two components his Law of System Completeness requires: Interface and Sensors. A Law is science is something that has an abundance of evidence, which Mann's "law" does not have. The objection assumes the two models are rival descriptions of one thing. They are not. The Law of System Completeness specifies what an engineered system needs in order to work; DSRP-484 describes how information is organized. On its own terms the objection also mistakes composites for primitives. An interface, on Mann's own account, is where a system meets its environment, which is a relational boundary, a boundary is a distinction (D) and it involves a complex interaction (R). Also, the Cabrera's publish widely on Context, Contextual Identity, and Contextual Dark Matter as structural forms. A sensor is a vantage from which a difference registers, which is a perspective brought to bear on a system. Neither is a part DSRP is missing; both are things the four patterns build.

**Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P

## Refers to

- [Contextual Identity and Cognitive Dark Matter in DSRP-484](https://dsrpevidence.org/element/542)
- [Measuring Context as Structural Organization](https://dsrpevidence.org/element/604)

**Added** 2026-10-04

**How to cite this** Mann (2018). DSRP vs LoSC. The TRIZ Journal.