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(Note that information about the existence of a problem may be necessary but not sufficient to trigger action—information about resources, incentives, and consequences is necessary too.)
Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
your mental
model of the system needs to include all the important flows, or you will be surprised by the system’s behavior.
A richer economy usually has better health care and a lower death rate.
Lol
Placing a system in a straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve. —C. S. Holling,2 ecologist
As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers.
Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so.
Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.
There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren’t, they will be system-imposed.
God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!
The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.
The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.
platfoms need fast feedbck loops!
Be especially careful not to confuse effort with result or you will end up with a system that is producing effort, not result.
For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take.
a warning for architects
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.
first. seek to understand
Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.
most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.
