Thinking In Systems Quotes

“Don't be stopped by the "if you can't define it and measure it, I don't have to pay attention to it" ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system’s performance.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and • hone our abilities to understand parts, • see interconnections, • ask “what-if ” questions about possible future behaviors, and • be creative and courageous about system redesign.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic (since no one can know that for sure), but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter—they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too. A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power is no match for the temperature change imposed on the system. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.
-RUSSELL ACKOFF,' operations theorist”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer