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Intr del libro
The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.
The impact of behavior in different systems
see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.
Solutions
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
Percieving parts of the system
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.
What is a System?
Before going too far in that direction, it’s a good idea to stop dissecting out elements and to start looking for the interconnections, the relationships that hold the elements together.
Relations hold elements together
If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment but allocates little money or effort toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government’s purpose. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
Behavior & purlose vs goals. You are not innovating if your behavior does not show as it says.
An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.
Function vs purpose
A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same. To ask whether elements, interconnections, or purposes are most important in a system is to ask an unsystemic question. All are essential. All interact. All have their roles. But the least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior. Interconnections are also critically important. Changing relationships usually changes system behavior. The elements, the parts of systems we are most likely to notice, are often (not
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Same system, diffefent purpose = different results
The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows. Therefore, we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate.
Inflow vs outflow rate. The bathtub
You can adjust the drain or faucet of a bathtub—the flows—abruptly, but it is much more difficult to change the level of water—the stock—quickly. Water can’t run out the drain instantly, even if you open the drain all the way.
The bathtub theory
If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don’t expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don’t give up too soon. You can use the opportunities presented by a system’s momentum to guide it toward a good outcome—much as a judo expert uses the momentum of an opponent to achieve his or her own goals.
Expecations of stock movements #bathtub
Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows. That means system thinkers see the world as a collection of “feedback processes.”
System thinkers / Feedback loops
The more I practice piano, the more pleasure I get from the sound, and so the more I play the piano, which gives me more practice.
Piano feedback loop
THINK ABOUT THIS: If A causes B, is it possible that B also causes A?
Feedback loop
Esto mw parecio super
Whether in the future it grows or stays constant or dies off depends on whether its reinforcing growth loop remains stronger than its balancing depreciation loop.
Truth in business
Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors.
The importance of feedback structures
the big picture, one store’s inventory problem may seem trivial and fixable. But imagine that the inventory is that of all the unsold automobiles in America. Orders for more or fewer cars affect production not only at assembly plants and parts factories, but also at steel mills, rubber and glass plants, textile producers, and energy producers. Everywhere in this system are perception delays, production delays, delivery delays, and construction delays. Now consider the link between car production and jobs—increased production increases the number of jobs allowing more people to buy cars. That’s
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Delays in systems
Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable.
Renuvable principle
If the balancing loop is very weak, so that capital can go on growing even as the resource is reduced below its threshold ability to regenerate itself, the resource and the industry both collapse.
Collapse
The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.
Reduce destructive behaviors
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.
Recilience
The most marvelous characteristic of some complex systems is their ability to learn, diversify, complexify, evolve.
Self organization
Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes.
Productivity at the cost ofcreafivity
In the process of creating new structures and increasing complexity, one thing that a self-organizing system often generates is hierarchy. The world, or at least the parts of it humans think they understand, is organized in subsystems aggregated into larger subsystems, aggregated into still larger subsystems. A cell in your liver is a subsystem of an organ, which is a subsystem of you as an organism, and you are a subsystem of a family, an athletic team, a musical group, and so forth. These groups are subsystems of a town or city, and then a nation, and then the whole global socioeconomic
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Hierarchy
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 high serve the low
Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.
Thinking based on our experiences
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. That’s because long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why.
System thinker data aproach
System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.
System behavior
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.
History and events
The world is full of nonlinearities. So the world often surprises our linear-thinking minds. If we’ve learned that a small push produces a small response, we think that twice as big a push will produce twice as big a response. But in a nonlinear system, twice the push could produce one-sixth the response, or the response squared, or no response at all.
Nonlinearities
Bread will not rise without yeast, no matter how much flour it has. Children will not thrive without protein, no matter how many carbohydrates they eat. Companies can’t keep going without energy, no matter how many customers they have—or without customers, no matter how much energy they have. This concept of a limiting factor is simple and widely misunderstood.
The limiting factor
Insight comes not only from recognizing which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enhances limits and therefore changes what is limiting. The interplay between a growing plant and the soil, a growing company and its market, a growing economy and its resource base, is dynamic. Whenever one factor ceases to be limiting, growth occurs, and the growth itself changes the relative scarcity of factors until another becomes limiting. To shift attention from the abundant factors to the next potential limiting factor is to gain real understanding of, and control over, the
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Control over the growth process
Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview. From a wider perspective, information flows, goals, incentives, and disincentives can be restructured so that separate, bounded, rational actions do add up to results that everyone desires. It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.
Step outside the limited info
Some systems are structured to function well despite bounded rationality. The right feedback gets to the right place at the right time.
Feedback timming
To paraphrase a common prayer: God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!
Prayer
The resulting policy looked strange during a time of low birth rate, because it included free contraceptives and abortion—because of the principle that every child should be wanted. The policy also included widespread sex education, easier divorce laws, free obstetrical care, support for families in need, and greatly increased investment in education and health care.4 Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important goal than the number of Swedes.
Birth control example
THE TRAP: POLICY RESISTANCE When various actors try to pull a system stock toward various goals, the result can be policy resistance. Any new policy, especially if it’s effective, just pulls the stock farther from the goals of other actors and produces additional resistance, with a result that no one likes, but that everyone expends considerable effort in maintaining. THE WAY OUT Let go. Bring in all the actors and use the energy formerly expended on resistance to seek out mutually satisfactory ways for all goals to be realized—or redefinitions of larger and more important goals that everyone
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The way out. Let go.
Because there is no feedback to the user, overharvesting will continue. The resource will decline. Finally, the erosion loop will kick in, the resource will be destroyed, and all the users will be ruined. Surely, you’d think, no group of people would be so shortsighted as to destroy their commons. But consider just a few commonplace examples of commons that are being driven, or have been driven, to disaster: Uncontrolled access to a popular national park can bring in such crowds that the park’s natural beauties are destroyed. It is to everyone’s immediate advantage to go on using fossil fuels,
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Overharvesting and its consecuences
Educate and exhort. Help people to see the consequences of unrestrained use of the commons. Appeal to their morality. Persuade them to be temperate. Threaten transgressors with social disapproval or eternal hellfire. Privatize the commons. Divide it up, so that each person reaps the consequences of his or her own actions. If some people lack the self-control to stay below the carrying capacity of their own private resource, those people will harm only themselves and not others. Regulate the commons. Garrett Hardin calls this option, bluntly, “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” Regulation
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How to regulate commons
The reinforcing loop going downward, which said “the worse things get, the worse I’m going to let them get,” becomes a reinforcing loop going upward: “The better things get, the harder I’m going to work to make them even better.” If I had applied that lesson to my jogging, I’d be running marathons by now.
Reinforcing loop upward / downward
Success to the successful is a well-known concept in the field of ecology, where it is called “the competitive exclusion principle.” This principle says that two different species cannot live in exactly the same ecological niche, competing for exactly the same resources. Because the two species are different, one will necessarily reproduce faster, or be able to use the resource more efficiently than the other. It will win a larger share of the resource, which will give it the ability to multiply more and keep winning. It will not only dominate the niche, it will drive the losing competitor to
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The competitive exclusion principle
Then the original problem reappears, since nothing has been done to solve it at its root cause. So the intervenor applies more of the “solution,” disguising the real state of the system again, and thereby failing to act on the problem. That makes it necessary to use still more “solution.” The trap is formed if the intervention, whether by active destruction or simple neglect, undermines the original capacity of the system to maintain itself. If that capability atrophies, then more of the intervention is needed to achieve the desired effect. That weakens the capability of the original system
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System inrervention / Reappearing prlems when the root problem isnt fixed
Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem. Addictive policies are insidious, because they are so easy to sell, so simple to fall for.
Intervention as a drug
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. This option, helping the system to help itself, can be much cheaper and easier than taking over and running the system
Help the system to correct itself
THE WAY OUT Again, the best way out of this trap is to avoid getting in. Beware of symptom-relieving or signal-denying policies or practices that don’t really address the problem. Take the focus off short-term relief and put it on long-term restructuring.
The way out of short term solutions
THE TRAP: SEEKING THE WRONG GOAL System behavior is particularly sensitive to the goals of feedback loops. If the goals—the indicators of satisfaction of the rules—are defined inaccurately or incompletely, the system may obediently work to produce a result that is not really intended or wanted. THE WAY OUT Specify indicators and goals that reflect the real welfare of the system. Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result.
Defining the right goals
This idea of leverage points is not unique to systems analysis—it’s embedded in legend: the silver bullet; the trimtab; the miracle cure; the secret passage; the magic password; the single hero who turns the tide of history; the nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them. Leverage points are points of power.
Levarage points
With no other differences in the houses, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the highly visible location in the front hall. I love that story because it’s an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. It’s not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing feedback loop. It’s a new loop, delivering feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.
Data in feedback loops
