Thinking in Systems: A Primer

by Donella H. Meadows

A new information feedback loop at this point in this system will make it behave much better. But the decision makers are resistant to the information they need! They don’t pay attention to it, they don’t believe it, they don’t know how to interpret it. Why do people actively sort and screen information the way they do? How do they determine what to let in and what to let bounce off, what to reckon with and what to ignore or disparage? How is it that, exposed to the same information, different people absorb different messages, and draw different conclusions? If this feedback loop could just be oriented around that value, the system would produce a result that everyone wants. (Not more energy, but more energy services. Not GNP, but material sufficiency and security. Not growth, but progress.) We don’t have to change anyone’s values, we just have to get the system to operate around real values. What are values? Where do they come from? Are they universal, or culturally determined? What causes a person or a society to give up on attaining “real values” and to settle for cheap substitutes? How can you key a feedback loop to qualities you can’t measure, rather than to quantities you can? Here is a system that seems perverse on all counts. It produces inefficiency, ugliness, environmental degradation, and human misery. But if we sweep it away, we will have no system. Nothing is more frightening than that. (As I write, I have the former communist system of the Soviet Union in min...