Thinking In Systems Quotes

“[Evolution] appears to be not a series of accidents the course of which is determined only by the change of environments during earth history and the resulting struggle for existence, … but is governed by definite laws.… The discovery of these laws constitutes one of the most important tasks of the future. —Ludwig von Bertalanffy,3 biologist The most marvelous characteristic of some complex systems is their ability to learn, diversify, complexify, evolve. It is the ability of a single fertilized ovum to generate, out of itself, the incredible complexity of a mature frog, or chicken, or person. It is the ability of nature to have diversified millions of fantastic species out of a puddle of organic chemicals. It is the ability of a society to take the ideas of burning coal, making steam, pumping water, and specializing labor, and develop them eventually into an automobile assembly plant, a city of skyscrapers, a worldwide network of communications.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“[Evolution] appears to be not a series of accidents the course of which is determined only by the change of environments during earth history and the resulting struggle for existence, … but is governed by definite laws.… The discovery of these laws constitutes one of the most important tasks of the future. —Ludwig von Bertalanffy,3 biologist”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Why do systems work so well? Consider the properties of highly functional systems—machines or human communities or ecosystems—which are familiar to you. Chances are good that you may have observed one of three characteristics: resilience, self-organization, or hierarchy.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. —Aldo Leopold,1 forester”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Expand the Boundary of Caring Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails. As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“A great deal of responsibility was lost when rulers who declared war were no longer expected to lead the troops into battle. Warfare became even more irresponsible when it became possible to push a button and cause tremendous damage at such a distance that the person pushing the button never even sees the damage.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
― 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 don’t fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality. Be a quality detector. Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality. If quantity forms the goals of our feedback loops, if quantity is the center of our attention and language and institutions, if we motivate ourselves, rate ourselves, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“THE TRAP: DRIFT TO LOW PERFORMANCE Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance, especially if there is a negative bias in perceiving past performance, sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals that sets a system drifting toward low performance. THE WAY OUT Keep performance standards absolute. Even better, let standards be enhanced by the best actual performances instead of being discouraged by the worst. Use the same structure to set up a drift toward high performance!”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Another name for this system trap is “eroding goals.” It is also called 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.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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. If everyone can work harmoniously toward the same outcome (if all feedback loops are serving the same goal), the results can be amazing. The most familiar examples of this harmonization of goals are mobilizations of economies during wartime, or recovery after war or natural disaster. Another example was Sweden’s population policy. During the 1930s, Sweden’s birth rate dropped precipitously, and, like the governments of Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government worried about that. Unlike Romania and Hungary, the Swedish government assessed its goals and those of the population and decided that there was a basis of agreement, not on the size of the family, but on the quality of child care. Every child should be wanted and nurtured. No child should be in material need. Every child should have access to excellent education and health care. These were goals around which the government and the people could align themselves. The resulting policy looked strange during a time of low birth rate, because it included free contraceptives and abortion—because of the principle that every child should be wanted. The policy also included widespread sex education, easier divorce laws, free obstetrical care, support for families in need, and greatly increased investment in education and health care.4 Since then, the Swedish birth rate has gone up and down several times without causing panic in either direction, because the nation is focused on a far more important goal than the number of Swedes.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“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. It’s amazing how quickly and easily behavior changes can come, with even slight enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. But they don’t have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system. Fishermen don’t know how many fish there are, much less how many fish will be caught by other fishermen that same day. Businessmen don’t know for sure what other businessmen are planning to invest, or what consumers will be willing to buy, or how their products will compete. They don’t know their current market share, and they don’t know the size of the market. Their information about these things is incomplete and delayed, and their own responses are delayed. So they systematically under- and overinvest.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“events are the most visible aspect of a larger complex—but not always the most important.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“God and morality are outmoded ideas; people should be objective and scientific, should own and multiply the means of production, and should treat people and nature as instrumental inputs to production”—the organizing principles of the Industrial Revolution.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“If the desired system state is good education, measuring that goal by the amount”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“The answer clearly lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the spring. That is a central insight of systems theory. Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Understanding layers of limits and keeping an eye on the next upcoming limiting factor is not a recipe for perpetual growth, however. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.16 We have a system of national accounting that bears no resemblance to the national economy whatsoever, for it is not the record of our life at home but the fever chart of our consumption.17”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“Fred Kofman wrote in a systems journal: [Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language—both act as filters through which we perceive our world.… The language and information systems of an organization are not an objective means of describing an outside reality—they fundamentally structure the perceptions and actions of its members. To reshape the measurement and communication systems of a [society] is to reshape all potential interactions at the most fundamental level. Language … as articulation of reality is more primordial than strategy, structure, or … culture.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated. —POUL ANDERSON”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

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

“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer

“To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system—there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer