Thinking in Systems: A Primer

by Donella H. Meadows

From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems.

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.

There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.

Surely there is no power, no control, no understanding, not even a reason for being, much less acting, embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe.

In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

Social systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. Changing them is not as simple as saying “now all change,” or of trusting that he who knows the good shall do the good.

Systems thinking makes clear even to the most committed technocrat that getting along in this world of complex systems requires more than technocracy.

We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionist science has led us to expect.

The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.

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. We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.2

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.

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.

When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor.

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. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity.

Getting models out into the light of day, making them as rigorous as possible, testing them against the evidence, and being willing to scuttle them if they are no longer supported is nothing more than practicing the scientific method—something that is done too seldom even in science, and is done...

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

Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information.

Our information streams are composed primarily of language. Our mental models are mostly verbal. Honoring information means above all avoiding language pollution—making the cleanest possible use we can of language. Second, it means expanding our language so we can talk about complexity.

Language … as articulation of reality is more primordial than strategy, structure, or … culture.

society that talks incessantly about “productivity” but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word “resilience” is going to become productive and not resilient.

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.… He goes on to say: In this degenerative accounting, language is almost without the power of designation, because it is used conscientiously to refer to nothing in particular. Attention rests upon percentages, categories, abstract functions.… It is not language that the user will very likely be required to stand by or to act on, for it does not define any personal ground for standing or acting. Its only practical utility is to support with “expert opinion” a vast, impersonal technological action already begun.… It is a tyrannical language: tyrannese.

The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear.

The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.

No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system.

Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top.

Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not.

Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself.

Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another.

“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.

Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes.

Error-embracing is the condition for learning. It means seeking and using—and sharing—information about what went wrong with what you expected or hoped would go right.

There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems.

Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

The longer the operant time horizon, the better the chances for survival.

There is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.… There has always been something rather refreshing in the view that we should live like the birds, and perhaps posterity is for the birds in more senses than one; so perhaps we should all … go out and pollute something cheerfully. As an old taker of thought for the morrow, however, I cannot quite accept this solution.…11

Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other.

You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system.

Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring.

The public discourse is full of cynicism.

The literary critic and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch put it this way: Thus though man has never before been so complacent about what he has, or so confident of his ability to do whatever he sets his mind upon, it is at the same time true that he never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is. That same scientific method which enabled him to create his wealth and to unleash the power he wields has, he believes, enabled biology and psychology to explain him away—or at least to explain away whatever used to seem unique or even in any way mysterious.… Truly he is, for all his wealth and power, poor in spirit.12 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.