Thinking in Systems: A Primer

by Donella H. Meadows

You come to college when you want to learn something, and you leave when you’ve learned it. Suppose tenure were awarded to professors according to their ability to solve real-world problems, rather than to publish academic papers. Suppose a class got graded as a group, instead of as individuals. As we try to imagine restructured rules and what our behavior would be under them, we come to understand the power of rules.

The ower of rules

The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself.

System resilience

I said a while back that changing the players in the system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system.

Goals and systems

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. I say that because my own paradigms have been changed that way.

Changing paradigms

If this feedback loop could just be oriented around that value, the system would produce a result that everyone wants.

Systems and values

The people in this system are putting up with deleterious behavior because they are afraid of change. They don’t trust that a better system is possible. They feel they have no power to demand or bring about improvement. Why are people so easily convinced of their powerlessness? How do they become so cynical about their ability to achieve their visions? Why are they more likely to listen to people who tell them they can’t make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?

People believes around systems shifts

Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

Listening to systems

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system—peoples’ memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.

Before you disturbe, watch how it behaves

And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. (The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, we don’t have enough salesmen. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?) 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.

Defining system problems

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. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them to be plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out.

Everything you know is a model. Challenge it.

would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.

Lack of info makes feedback loops malfunction

[Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about.

Language

Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important.

System traps and wrong goals

But sometimes they can’t. And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system. “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. Because the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions.

Intrinsic responsability

These few examples are enough to get you thinking about how little our current culture has come to look for responsibility within the system that generates an action, and how poorly we design systems to experience the consequences of their actions.

Designing systems with consecuences to actions

Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each 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. They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system. It can be done. It’s very exciting when it happens.

Interdisciplinary Work in systems

We know what to do about drift to low performance. Don’t weigh the bad news more heavily than the good. And keep standards absolute. Systems thinking can only tell us to do that. It can’t do it. We’re back to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap, but it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

Don't weigh the bad news heavily than the good.

A stock is the memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

The meaning of a stock.