Thinking in systems - Donella H. Meadows

 

Part One: System Structure and Behavior

Chapter One: The basics

• The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
• Feedback loop.
• Reinforcing feedback loop.
• The time it takes for an exponentially growing stock to double in size, the "doubling time", equals approximately 70 divided by the growth rate (expressed as a percentage). Example: if you put $100 in the bank at 7% interest rate per year, you will double your money in 10 years (70%7 = 10). If you get only 5% interest, your money will take 14 years to double.

Chapter Two: A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo

• One good way to learn something new is through specific examples rather than abstractions and generalities.
• Whenever we see a growing entity, a bank account, we look for the reinforcing loops that are driving it and for the balancing loops that ultimately will constraint it.

Part Two: Systems and Us

Chapter Three: Why Systems Work So Well

• Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience - the ability to recover from perturbation, the ability to restore or repair themselves.
• This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization.
• Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if they are stable intermediate forms.
• Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well.
• 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.

Chapter Four: Why Systems Surprise Us

• We often draw illogical conclusions from accurate assumptions, or logical conclusions from inaccurate assumptions.
• Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more.
• 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.
• When a systems thinker encounters a problem, the first thing he or she does is look for data, time graphs, the history of the system.
• National boundaries means nothing when it comes to ozone depletion in the stratosphere, or green-house gases (gaz à effet de serre) in the atmosphere, or ocean dumping.
• It's great art to remember the boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. It's a challenge to stay creative enough to drop the boundaries that worked for the last problem and to find the most appropriate set of boundaries for the next question. It's also a necessity, if problems are to be solved well.
• Growth itself depletes or enhances limits.
• To shift attention from the abundant factors to the next potential limiting factor is to gain real understanding of, and control over, the growth process.
• I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create.
• To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem.
• Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have.
• We rarely see the full range of possibilities before us.
• We pay too much attention to recent experience and too little attention to the past.

Chapter Five: System Traps...and Opportunities

• All the actors work hard to achieve their different roles.
• If you calm down, those who are pulling against you will calm down too.
• The actor tends to believe bad news more than good news.
• "Eroding goals". It is also called the "boiled frog syndrome".
• Drift to low performance is gradual process.
• The better things get, the harder I am going to work to make them even better.
• "Success to the successful": This system trap is found whenever the winners of a competition receive, as part of the reward, the means to compete even more effectively in the future.
• The trap of success to the successful does its greatest damage in the many ways it works to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. 

Part Three: Creating Change-in Systems and in Our Philosophy

Chapter Six: Leverage Points- Places to intervene in a System

• The Fed's fiddling with the interest rate hasn't made business cycles go away.
• Stocks that are big, relative to their flows, are more stable than the small ones.
• There is a systemic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions.
• If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.
• Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience.
• A system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.
• Encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity means "losing control".
• 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.
• If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.
• The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it.
• There are no cheap tickets to mastery.
• Throwing yourself into the humility of not-knowing.

Chapter Seven: Living in a World of Systems

• Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable.
• We can't keep track of everything.
• All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback.
• Get the Beat of the System.
• Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day.
• Mental flexibility- the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice 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.
• Honor, Respect, and Distribution Information.
• Information is power.
• Pay Attention to What Is Important, Not Just What Is Quantifiable.
• Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top.
• Locate Responsibility in the System.
• "Intrinsic responsibility"
• Because the pilot of a plane rides in front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions.
• Privatizing a commons.
• Stay Humble- Stay a learner
• The way you learn is by experiment, by trial and error, error, error.
• 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.
• "Error-embracing"
• Expand Time Horizons
• You need to be watching both the short and long term, the whole system.
• Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to be academically correct.
• We know what to do about drift to low performance. Don't weigh the bad news more heavily than the good.