Thinking in Systems: A Primer

by Donella H. Meadows

Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns.

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

Watch out! If you see feedback loops everywhere, you’re already in danger of becoming a systems thinker! Instead of seeing only how A causes B, you’ll begin to wonder how B may also influence A—and how A might reinforce or reverse itself.

The higher and faster you grow, the farther and faster you fall, when you’re building up a capital stock dependent on a nonrenewable resource.

Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms, are arranged in hierarchies. It is no accident that that is so. If subsystems can largely take care of themselves, regulate themselves, maintain themselves, and yet serve the needs of the larger system, while the larger system coordinates and enhances the functioning of the subsystems, a stable, resilient, and efficient structure results. It is hard to imagine how any other kind of arrangement could have come to be.

Misses decentralized systems

Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. The daily news tells of elections, battles, political agreements, disasters, stock market booms or busts. Much of our ordinary conversation is about specific happenings at specific times and places. A team wins. A river floods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 10,000. Oil is discovered. A forest is cut. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system.

Some systems are structured to function well despite bounded rationality. The right feedback gets to the right place at the right time. Under ordinary circumstances, your liver gets just the information it needs to do its job. In undisturbed ecosystems and traditional cultures, the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole. These systems and others are self-regulatory. They do not cause problems. We don’t have government agencies and dozens of failed policies about them.

The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.

Even people within systems don’t often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving. “To make profits,” most corporations would say, but that’s just a rule, a necessary condition to stay in the game. What is the point of the game? To grow, to increase market share, to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation, so that its operations becomes ever more shielded from uncertainty. John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that corporate goal—to engulf everything—long ago.6 It’s the goal of a cancer too. Actually it’s the goal of every living population—and only a bad one when it isn’t balanced by higher-level balancing feedback loops that never let an upstart power-loop-driven entity control the world. The goal of keeping the market competitive has to trump the goal of each individual corporation to eliminate its competitors, just as in ecosystems, the goal of keeping populations in balance and evolving has to trump the goal of each population to reproduce without limit.