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a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.
and you’ll experience directly the joys of hot and cold oscillations because of a long response delay.
A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
Resilience is a measure of a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment.
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.
This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization.
When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.
When a systems thinker encounters a problem, the first thing he or she does is look for data, time graphs, the history of the system.
If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits.
If any one actor gains an advantage and moves the system stock (drug supply) in one direction (enforcement agencies manage to cut drug imports at the border), the others double their efforts to pull it back (street prices go up, addicts have to commit more crimes to buy their daily fixes, higher prices bring more profits, suppliers use the profits to buy planes and boats to evade the border patrols).
Rule beating means evasive action to get around the intent of a system’s rules—abiding by the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.
The way out of the trap, the opportunity, is to understand rule beating as useful feedback, and to revise, improve, rescind, or better explain the rules.
