Thinking In Systems Quotes

“Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system and getting an overview. From a wider perspective, information flows, goals, incentives, and disincentives can be restructured so that separate, bounded, rational actions do add up to results that everyone desires.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential. To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Systems surprise us because our minds like to think about single causes neatly producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at a time. And we don’t like, especially when our own plans and desires are involved, to think about limits.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“A linear relationship between two elements in a system can be drawn on a graph with a straight line. It’s a relationship with constant proportions. If I put 10 pounds of fertilizer on my field, my yield will go up by 2 bushels. If I put on 20 pounds, my yield will go up by 4 bushels. If I put on 30 pounds, I’ll get an increase of 6 bushels.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. The daily news tells of elections, battles, political agreements, disasters, stock market booms or busts. Much of our ordinary conversation is about specific happenings at specific times and places. A team wins. A river floods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 10,000. Oil is discovered. A forest is cut. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect their properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“our models fall far short of representing the world fully. That is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised. In our heads, we can keep track of only a few variables at one time. We often draw illogical conclusions from accurate assumptions, or logical conclusions from inaccurate assumptions.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well. Promoting or managing for these properties of a system can improve its ability to function well over the long term—to be sustainable”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The information delivered by a feedback loop—even nonphysical feedback—can only affect future behavior; it can’t deliver a signal fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback. Even nonphysical information takes time to feedback into the system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If A causes B, is it possible that B also causes A? You’ll be thinking not in terms of a static world, but a dynamic one. You’ll stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“I’d need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it’s necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work.… I am in a vicious circle … from which it is impossible to escape. —Honoré Balzac,4 19th century novelist and playwright”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“We are complex systems—our own bodies are magnificent examples of integrated, interconnected, self-maintaining complexity. Every person we encounter, every organization, every animal, garden, tree, and forest is a complex system.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“So, what is a system? 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. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves.… There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. —ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Everything is connected to everything else, and not neatly.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“No paradigm is "true", 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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Work in such a way as to restore or enhance the system's own ability to solve its problems, then remove yourself”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“A little tasteful advertising can awaken interest in a product. A lot of blatant advertising can cause disgust for the product.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“It's a guess about the future, and the future is inherently uncertain. Although you may have a strong opinion about it, there's no way to prove you're right until the future actually happens.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“[...] you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“At a time when the world is more messy, more crowded, more interconnected, more interdependent, and more rapidly changing than ever before, the more ways of seeing, the better.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“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. —Wendell Berry,1 writer and Kentucky farmer”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus. Both of them made fine watches, and they both had many customers. People dropped into their stores, and their phones rang constantly with new orders. Over the years, however, Hora prospered, while Tempus became poorer and poorer. That’s because Hora discovered the principle of hierarchy.… The watches made by both Hora and Tempus consisted of about one thousand parts each. Tempus put his together in such a way that if he had one partly assembled and had to put it down—to answer the phone, say—it fell to pieces. When he came back to it, Tempus would have to start all over again. The more his customers phoned him, the harder it became for him to find enough uninterrupted time to finish a watch. Hora’s watches were no less complex than those of Tempus, but he put together stable subassemblies of about ten elements each. Then he put ten of these subassemblies together into a larger assembly; and ten of those assemblies constituted the whole watch. Whenever Hora had to put down a partly completed watch to answer the phone, he lost only a small part of his work. So he made his watches much faster and more efficiently than did Tempus.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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