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Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.
Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.
This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization.
You see self-organization in a more profound way whenever a seed sprouts, or a baby learns to speak, or a neighborhood decides to come together to oppose a toxic waste dump.
Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.
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.
Fortunately, self-organization is such a basic property of living systems that even the most overbearing power structure can never fully kill it,
Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic. That may explain why hierarchies are so common in the systems nature presents to us. Among all possible complex forms, hierarchies are the only ones that have had the time to evolve.
There is a huge discrepancy between your desired and actual state, and there are very few options available to you for closing that gap. But one thing you can do is take drugs. The drugs do nothing to improve your real situation—in fact, they likely make it worse. But the drugs quickly alter your perception of your state, numbing your senses and making you feel tireless and brave.
MIT’s Jay Forrester likes to say that the average manager can define the current problem very cogently, identify the system structure that leads to the problem, and guess with great accuracy where to look for leverage points—places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior.
The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it, if you can.
Amory Lovins and his team at Rocky Mountain Institute have done wonders on energy conservation by simply straightening out bent pipes and enlarging ones that are too small.
Reducing the gain around a reinforcing loop—slowing the growth—is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening balancing loops, and far more preferable than letting the reinforcing loop run.
