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If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.… There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. —ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.… Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,1 operations theorist
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.
Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.
Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.
Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.
The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.
A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.
A stock is the memory of the history of changing flows within the system.
Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be independent and temporarily out of balance with each other.
Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.
Systems of information-feedback control are fundamental to all life and human endeavor, from the slow pace of biological evolution to the launching of the latest space satellite.… Everything we do as individuals, as an industry, or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system. —Jay W. Forrester3
In other words, if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior. That mechanism operates through a feedback loop. It is the consistent behavior pattern over a long period of time that is the first hint of the existence of a feedback loop.
Balancing feedback loops are equilibrating or goal-seeking structures in systems and are both sources of stability and sources of resistance to change.
Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or to runaway collapses over time. They are found whenever a stock has the capacity to reinforce or reproduce itself.
The … goal of all theory is to make the … basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of … experience. —Albert Einstein,1 physicist
Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors.
One of the central insights of systems theory, as central as the observation that systems largely cause their own behavior, is that systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors, even if the outward appearance of these systems is completely dissimilar.
A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
Delays are pervasive in systems, and they are strong determinants of behavior. Changing the length of a delay may (or may not, depending on the type of delay and the relative lengths of other delays) make a large change in the behavior of a system.
Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience—the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.
Systems often have the property of self-organization—the ability to structure themselves, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and complexify. Even complex forms of self-organization may arise from relatively simple organizing rules—or may not.
Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic.
When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.
Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.
The trouble … is that we are terrifyingly ignorant. The most learned of us are ignorant.… The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance—almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. —Wendell Berry,1 writer and Kentucky farmer
System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.
And that’s one reason why systems of all kinds surprise us. We are too fascinated by the events they generate. We pay too little attention to their history. And we are insufficiently skilled at seeing in their history clues to the structures from which behavior and events flow.
When we think in terms of systems, we see that a fundamental misconception is embedded in the popular term “side-effects.”… This phrase means roughly “effects which I hadn’t foreseen or don’t want to think about.”… Side-effects no more deserve the adjective “side” than does the “principal” effect. It is hard to think in terms of systems, and we eagerly warp our language to protect ourselves from the necessity of doing so. —Garrett Hardin,5 ecologist
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion—the questions we want to ask.
At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting.
Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.
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.
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.
The bounded rationality of each actor in a system—determined by the information, incentives, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints impinging on that actor—may or may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.
What makes a difference is redesigning the system to improve the information, incentives, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints that have an effect on specific actors.
Another of Jay Forrester’s famous systems sayings goes: It doesn’t matter how the tax law of a country is written. There is a shared idea in the minds of the society about what a “fair” distribution of the tax load is. Whatever the laws say, by fair means or foul, by complications, cheating, exemptions or deductions, by constant sniping at the rules, actual tax payments will push right up against the accepted idea of “fairness.”
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is. —G. K. Chesterton,1 20th century writer
Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear.
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure.
Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all.
as Aldo Leopold did with his land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”10
