More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That means system thinkers see the world as a collection of “feedback processes.”
Feedback
Balancing feedback loops are equilibrating or goal-seeking structures in systems and are both sources of stability and sources of resistance to change.
Balancing feedback loop
Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or to runaway collapses over time. They are found whenever a stock has the capacity to reinforce or reproduce itself.
Reinforcing feedback loops
Of course, in real systems feedback loops rarely come singly. They are linked together, often in fantastically complex patterns. A single stock is likely to have several reinforcing and balancing loops of differing strengths pulling it in several directions.
Linked feedback loops
This behavior is an example of shifting dominance of feedback loops. Dominance is an important concept in systems thinking. When one loop dominates another, it has a stronger impact on behavior. Because systems often have several competing feedback loops operating simultaneously, those loops that dominate the system will determine the behavior.
Shifting dominance
Complex behaviors of systems often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift, causing first one loop and then another to dominate behavior.
Shift in dominance
A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
Oscillation
In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.
Balanced exponent
Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation.
System resilience
A set of feedback loops that can restore or rebuild feedback loops is resilience at a still higher level—meta-resilience,
Meta-resilience
Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience—the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.
Resilience in systems
Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures.
Self-organization
Systems often have the property of self-organization—the ability to structure themselves, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and complexify. Even complex forms of self-organization may arise from relatively simple organizing rules—or may not.
Self organisation summary
Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.
Hierarchical systems
Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well.
Core attributes of a good dynamic system
System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.
Nonlinear systems generally cannot be solved and cannot be added together.… Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.…
Nonlinearity
At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting.
The most important input
Rich countries transfer capital or technology to poor ones and wonder why the economies of the receiving countries still don’t develop, never thinking that capital or technology may not be the most limiting factors.
Limiting factors
the “boiled frog syndrome,” from the old story (I don’t know whether it is true) that a frog put suddenly in hot water will jump right out, but if it is put into cold water that is gradually heated up, the frog will stay there happily until it boils. “Seems to be getting a little warm in here. Well, but then it’s not
so much warmer than it was a while ago.” Drift to low performance is a gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance.
Boiled frog
There are two antidotes to eroding goals. One is to keep standards absolute, regardless of performance. Another is to make goals sensitive to the best performances of the past, instead of the worst. If perceived performance has an upbeat bias instead of a downbeat one, if one takes the best results as a standard, and the worst results only as a temporary setback, then the same system structure can pull the system up to better and better performance.
Antidotes to eroding goals
Why are the natural correction mechanisms failing? How can obstacles to their success be removed? How can mechanisms for their success be made more effective?
Questions to ask when a system is failing
Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.
Insistence on cultures
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.
The world is nearly visible
