Thinking in Systems: A Primer

by Donella H. Meadows

When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential. To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, the world presents us with multiple examples of people acting rationally in their short-term best interests and producing aggregate results that no one likes.

Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. But they don’t have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system.

Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises.

“The better things get, the harder I’m going to work to make them even better.”

But even escalating in a good direction can be a problem, because it isn’t easy to stop. Each hospital trying to outdo the others in up-to-date, powerful, expensive diagnostic machines can lead to out-of-sight health care costs. Escalation in morality can lead to holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness. Escalation in art can lead from baroque to rococo to kitsch. Escalation in environmentally responsible lifestyles can lead to rigid and unnecessary puritanism.

The problem can be avoided up front by intervening in such a way as to strengthen the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens.

In the early days of family planning in India, program goals were defined in terms of the number of IUDs implanted. So doctors, in their eagerness to meet their targets, put loops into women without patient approval. These examples confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes in designing systems around the wrong goal.

You have the problem of wrong goals when you find something stupid happening “because it’s the rule.” You have the problem of rule beating when you find something stupid happening because it’s the way around the rule. Both of these system perversions can be going on at the same time with regard to the same rule.

Look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, “success to the successful” loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more.

Suppose any public or private official who made the decision to invest in a nuclear power plant got the waste from that facility stored on his or her lawn. Suppose (this is an old one) the politicians who declare war were required to spend that war in the front lines.

If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.

changing the players in the system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system.

Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole.

People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment.

If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.

The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it—that’s why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings.

Listen to any discussion, in your family or a committee meeting at work or among the pundits in the media, and watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in “predict, control, or impose your will” mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it’s doing it.

Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.

Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy.

“Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course.

other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct.