Systems Thinking for Business Quotes

“A Black Swan event has three important characteristics. 1. The event is unexpected, or considered improbable, to the observer. 2. The event has a major impact on the observer. 3.       In hindsight, the observer rationalizes that they "should have seen it coming." This, then, is a narrative fallacy”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Deductive reasoning, the bedrock of the scientific method, begins with a new theory which leads to a prediction (a hypothesis). The real world is tested and observed to determine if the theory is supported. One can think of deduction as being top down or theory driven (or general to specific). Induction, on the other hand, begins with observations from the real world. Based on these observations, patterns are recognized and new theories proposed (specific to general). The different methods have important implications on model construction.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Modeling—a process to develop a representation of reality to understand, communicate, or predict.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“System 2 burns a lot of fuel (glucose from the bloodstream), and the tendency to accept the recommendations of System 1 reduces its overall fuel usage.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Storing information as a story, linked with causality, could help meet the biological need to efficiently store, retrieve, and reduce the dimensionality of information.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Combinatorial complexity is well understood and can be tackled in an engineering fashion. For example, the airline schedule is usually built using a technique called linear programming. In the case of dynamics, changes through time create the complexity, like the anthill we discussed in the first chapter. In this case, engineering techniques may struggle. Dynamic complexity is the topic addressed by systems thinking.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Complexity can be categorized into two types: combinatorial and dynamic.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“The negative effects of virtuous turned vicious loops is an extremely important lesson to keep in mind.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“As an ultimate example of emergence, consider your own consciousness that is emerging from the connections of neurons in your brain.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“The term we use for the unanticipated result from these interactions is emergence. While not all interactions create emergent effects, when emergence does occur it is difficult, if not practically impossible, to predict based on the study of the components of the system. From this standpoint, one might characterize systems thinking as the antithesis of reductionism.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“While ants may be extremely strong for their weight, they're not particularly smart. Instead, the ant hill is built from the interactions between the ants, who are acting based on their own simple set of rules.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“systems theory or, as some people might call it, complexity theory? The simplest explanation is that it is the study of interactions.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight