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The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.
A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.
Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.
In fact, 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.
Systems thinkers use graphs of system behavior to understand trends over time, rather than focusing attention on individual events.
So how does someone with limited experience in a system, like a workplace, understand the system to work well within it and move it towards positive change?
The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior; it can’t deliver the information, and so can’t have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback.
Therefore, 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 higher and faster you grow, the farther and faster you fall, when you’re building up a capital stock dependent on a nonrenewable resource.
Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate.
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.
A resilient system has a big plateau, a lot of space over which it can wander, with gentle, elastic walls that will bounce it back, if it comes near a dangerous edge. As a system loses its resilience, its plateau shrinks, and its protective walls become lower and more rigid, until the system is operating on a knife-edge, likely to fall off in one direction or another whenever it makes a move.
Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms.
The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.
When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.
Just as damaging as suboptimization, of course, is the problem of too much central control.
