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Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions, not only because they give a system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of.
When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.
The trouble … is that we are terrifyingly ignorant. The most learned of us are ignorant.… The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance—almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it.
Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world.
We often are not very skilled in understanding the nature of relationships. A linear relationship between two elements in a system can be drawn on a graph with a straight line.
nonlinear relationship is one in which the cause does not produce a proportional effect. The relationship between cause and effect can only be drawn with curves or wiggles, not with a straight line. If I put 100 pounds of fertilizer on, my yield will go up by 10 bushels; if I put on 200, my yield will not go up at all; if I put on 300, my yield will go down. Why? I’ve damaged my soil with “too much of a good thing.”
At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting.
The gestation and maturation delay in building up breeding populations of animals or plants, causing the characteristic oscillations of commodity prices: 4-year cycles for pigs, 7 years for cows, 11 years for cocoa trees.
Rational elites … know everything there is to know about their self-contained technical or scientific worlds, but lack a broader perspective. They range from Marxist cadres to Jesuits, from Harvard MBAs to army staff officers.… They have a common underlying concern: how to get their particular system to function. Meanwhile … civilization becomes increasingly directionless and incomprehensible.
Putting up with them is impossible. They need to be
Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance, especially if there is a negative bias in perceiving past performance, sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals that sets a system drifting toward low performance.
Each actor takes its desired state from the other’s perceived system state—and ups it! Escalation is not just keeping up with the Joneses, but keeping slightly ahead of the Joneses. The United States and the Soviet Union for years exaggerated their reports of each other’s armaments in order to justify more armaments of their own.
Using accumulated wealth, privilege, special access, or inside information to create more wealth, privilege, access or information are examples of the archetype called “success to the successful.”
Departments of governments, universities, and corporations often engage in pointless spending at the end of the fiscal year just to get rid of money—because if they don’t spend their budget this year, they will be allocated less next year.
Notice that rule beating produces the appearance of rules being followed. Drivers obey the speed limits, when they’re in the vicinity of a police car. Feed grains are no longer imported into Europe.
