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A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
It’s easier to learn about a system’s elements than about its interconnections.
Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.
A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.
A feedback loop is formed when changes in a stock affect the flows into or out of that same stock.
Balancing feedback loops are equilibrating or goal-seeking structures in systems and are both sources of stability and sources of resistance to change.
A reinforcing feedback loop enhances whatever direction of change is imposed on it.
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,
This perverse kind of result can be seen all the time—someone trying to fix a system is attracted intuitively to a policy lever that in fact does have a strong effect on the system. And then the well-intentioned fixer pulls the lever in the wrong direction! This is just one example of how we can be surprised by the counterintuitive behavior of systems when we start trying to change them.
any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint, sooner or later. That constraint will take the form of a balancing loop that in some way shifts the dominance of the reinforcing loop driving the growth behavior, either by strengthening the outflow or by weakening the inflow.
the main effect of rising price is to build the capital stock higher before it collapses.
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.
If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. —Aldo Leopold,1 forester
Placing a system in a straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve. —C. S. Holling,2 ecologist
Resilience is not the same thing as being static or constant over time. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short-term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!
Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.
Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.
These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures.
The agricultural revolution and all that followed started with the simple, shocking ideas that people could stay settled in one place, own land, select and cultivate crops.
Nope - see The Dawn of Everything!
The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better. This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and the lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget.
Economic examples of overcontrol from the top, from companies to nations, are the causes of some of the great catastrophes of history, all of which are by no means behind us.
To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system—there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing.
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
Everything we think we know about the world is a model.
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.
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.
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.
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 only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement—artificial, mental-model boundaries. The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries.
The right boundary for thinking about a problem rarely coincides with the boundary of an academic discipline, or with a political boundary.
Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem. We are rarely that flexible. We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to.
It’s a challenge to stay creative enough to drop the boundaries that worked for the last problem and to find the most appropriate set of boundaries for the next question. It’s also a necessity, if problems are to be solved well.
There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren’t, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. 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.
There is no rational reason why a polluter should desist.
The structure of a commons system makes selfish behavior much more convenient and profitable than behavior that is responsible to the whole community and to the future.
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.”
But even escalating in a good direction can be a problem, because it isn’t easy to stop. Each hospital trying to outdo the others in up-to-date, powerful, expensive diagnostic machines can lead to out-of-sight health care costs. Escalation in morality can lead to holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness. Escalation in art can lead from baroque to rococo to kitsch. Escalation in environmentally responsible lifestyles can lead to rigid and unnecessary puritanism.
The only other graceful way out of the escalation system is to negotiate a disarmament. That’s a structural change, an exercise in system design.
losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.
If you are the intervenor, work in such a way as to restore or enhance the system’s own ability to solve its problems, then remove yourself.
We have a system of national accounting that bears no resemblance to the national economy whatsoever, for it is not the record of our life at home but the fever chart of our consumption.
Usually a balancing loop will kick in sooner or later. The epidemic will run out of infectible people—or people will take increasingly stronger steps to avoid being infected.
This feels quaint in 2022.
Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.
So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.8 You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.
Garrett Hardin has suggested that people who want to prevent other people from having an abortion are not practicing intrinsic responsibility, unless they are personally willing to bring up the resulting child!7
Error-embracing is the condition for learning.
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.”
