Thinking In Systems Quotes

“Error-embracing is the condition for learning. It means seeking and using—and sharing—information about what went wrong with what you expected or hoped would go right. Both error embracing and living with high levels of uncertainty emphasize our personal as well as societal vulnerability. Typically we hide our vulnerabilities from ourselves as well as from others. But … to be the kind of person who truly accepts his responsibility … requires knowledge of and access to self far beyond that possessed by most people in this society.9”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. 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 future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. 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

“When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization. Just as damaging as suboptimization, of course, is the problem of too much central control. If the brain controlled each cell so tightly that the cell could not perform its self-maintenance functions, the whole organism could die. If central rules and regulations prevent students or faculty from exploring fields of knowledge freely, the purpose of the university is not served. The coach of a team might interfere with the on-the-spot perceptions of a good player, to the detriment of the team. Economic examples of overcontrol from the top, from companies to nations, are the causes of some of the great catastrophes of history, all of which are by no means behind us.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“That’s why behavior-based econometric models are pretty good at predicting the near-term performance of the economy, quite bad at predicting the longer-term performance, and terrible at telling one how to improve the performance of the economy.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“In other words, if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. 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

“Every balancing feedback loop has its breakdown point, where other loops pull the stock away from its goal more strongly than it can pull back.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Pay Attention to What Is Important, Not Just What Is Quantifiable”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.8 You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If we’re to understand anything, we have to simplify, which means we have to make boundaries.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“The world is nonlinear. Trying to make it linear for our mathematical or administrative convenience is not usually a good idea even when feasible, and it is rarely feasible.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Stocks usually change slowly. They can act as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, and sources of momentum in a system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements-as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and."
-Sufi teaching story”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“A system is a set of things-people, cells, molecules, or whatever-interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

“Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“I realize with fright that my impatience for the re-establishment of democracy had something almost communist in it; or, more generally, something rationalist. I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly. I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create. We have to patiently sow the seeds, assiduously water the earth where they are sown and give the plants the time that is their own. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history. —Václav Havel,7 playwright, last President of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer