These are my notes on Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows.
The book covers the basic of Systems Thinking.
Key Insights
- The system response to an external stimulus is a characteristic of the system itself.
- The purpose of a system is the most crucial determinant of the system's behaviour.
- Changes on purpose are the most drastic.
- Stocks:
- Are the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time.
- Act as delays, buffers or shock absorbers in systems.
- Allows inflows and outflows to be independent and decoupled and temporarily out of balance with each other.
- Flows can change suddenly.
- The human mind focus more easily on stocks than on flows, and more on inflows than outflows.
- Feedback loops: Balancing vs Reinforcing.
- Information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behaviour.
- There is always a delay.
If A cause B, is it possible that B also causes A?
- System studies are not designed to predict what will happen. They are designed to explore what would happen if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.
- Delays are pervasive in systems, and they are strong determinants of behaviour.
- Structures:
- Self-Organization:
- Produces heterogeneity and unpredictability.
- Requires freedom, experimentation and unpredictability.
- Threat to power structures.
- Hierarchy:
- Give systems stability, resilience and reduce cognitive load in the subsystems.
- The original purpose is always to help its original subsystems do their job better.
- Resilience and self-organization are often sacrificed for short-term productivity and stability.
- Self-Organization:
- Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so.
- We are fascinated by the events generated, and we pay too little attention to their history.
- The greatest complexities arise exactly at the boundaries of systems.
- Boundaries are of our own making, and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem or purpose.
- The most important input to a system is the one that is most limiting.
- For systems to work well, the right feedback must get to the right place at the right time.
- Change comes from enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.
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System traps:
- Drift to low performance:
- Allow performance standards to be influenced by past performance, specially negative perceived performance, creating a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals.
- Keep performance absolute.
- Allow performance standards to be influenced by past performance, specially negative perceived performance, creating a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals.
- Success to the successful - Competitive Exclusion:
- Winners are systematically reworded with means to win again, a reinforcing loop, where winners will eventually take all.
- Shifting the burden to the intervenor:
- Intervention erodes the self-maintaining capacity of the system, which requires more intervention, creating a destructive reinforcing loop.
- Seeking the wrong goal:
- Define outcomes, not outputs.
- Drift to low performance:
- People deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, but often they push the change in the wrong direction.
- Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.
- Before you disturb system, watch how it behaves.
- Start by focusing on the historical facts.
- Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
- The universe spends its time in transient behaviour on its way to something else.
TOC
- Introduction
- Part 1 - System Structure and Behaviour
- Part 2 - Systems and Us
- Part 3 - Creating Change in Systems and in Our Philosophy
Introduction
- A system is a set of thing interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behaviour over time.
- The system response to an external stimulus is a characteristic of the system itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.
- Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, ... are intrinsically system problems: stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure the system.
Part 1 - System Structure and Behaviour
Chapter 1 - The Basics
- Systems consist of:
- Elements.
- Interconnections.
- Function or purpose.
- The least obvious.
- Most crucial determinant of the system's behaviour.
- One of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behaviour that no one wants.
- Relative importance:
- Changing elements has the least effect.
- Changing interconnections may alter the system greatly.
- Changes on purpose are drastic.
- Changing an element is the less noticeable, unless it also changes interconnections or purpose.
- Stocks:
- Are the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time.
- Change over time through the actions of flow.
- Take time to change, because flows take time to flow:
- Act as delays, buffers or shock absorbers in systems.
- Allows inflows and outflows to be independent and decoupled and temporarily out of balance with each other.
- Flows can change suddenly.
- The human mind focus more easily on stocks than on flows, and more on inflows than outflows.
- All system diagrams are simplifications of the real world.
- Feedback loops:
- When changes in a stock affect the flows into or out of that same stock.
- Balancing feedback loop:
- Goal-seeking or stability-seeking.
- Tries to keep a stock at a given value or within a range of values.
- It may not work well or be strong enough.
- Tagged as "B" in system diagrams.
- Reinforcing feedback loop:
- Generates more input to a stock the more stock there is already there.
- A vicious or virtuous cycle.
- Whenever a stock has the capacity to reinforce or reproduce itself.
- Tagged as "B" in system diagrams.
If A cause B, is it possible that B also causes A?
Chapter 2 - Brief visit to the Systems Zoo
- Information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behaviour.
- There is always a delay.
- Delay and current state of flows should be taken into account in the balancing feedback loop.
- Dominance: when one feedback loop dominates another, it has a strong impact on behaviour.
- System studies are not designed to predict what will happen. They are designed to explore what would happen if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.
- Questions for testing the value of a model:
- Are the driving factors likely to unfold this way?
- Speculative answer.
- If they did, would the system react this way?
- Scientific answer.
- What is driving the driving factors?
- System boundaries: are they independent or embedded within the system?
- Are the driving factors likely to unfold this way?
- Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviours, even if the outward appearance is completely dissimilar.
- A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
- Delays are pervasive in systems, and they are strong determinants of behaviour.
- Changing the length of a delay may make a large change in the behaviour of a system.
- The trick is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviours, and what conditions release those behaviours, and arrange the structures and conditions to encourage the beneficial ones.
- Zoo:
- A stock with two competing balancing loops - A thermostat
- A stock with one reinforcing loop and one balancing loop - Population and Industrial Economy
- A system with delays - Business Inventory
- Oscillation if delay is too short:
- A renewable stock constrained by a non-renewable stock - an oil economy:
- Constraints take the form of a balancing loop that will shift the dominance of the reinforcing growth loop, by strengthening the out flow or weakening the inflow.
- The higher and faster you grow, the farther and faster you fall, when you are building up a capital stock dependant on a nonrenewable resource.
- Renewable stock constrained by a renewable stock - a fish economy
- 3 scenarios:
- Depends on:
- Critical threshold beyond which the renewable stock cannot reproduce itself.
- Speed of balancing feedback loop that slows capital growth:
- Fast: equilibrium.
- Slow: oscillation.
- Too slow: collapse.
Part 2 - Systems and Us
Chapter 3 - Why systems work so well
- Why?
- Resilience: it can be managed, enhanced.
- Self-Organization:
- Capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex.
- Fundamental to living systems.
- Produces heterogeneity and unpredictability.
- Requires freedom, experimentation and unpredictability.
- Threat to power structures.
- Hierarchy:
- Give systems stability, resilience and reduce cognitive load in the subsystems.
- Relationship within a subsystem are stronger than across subsystems.
- The original purpose is always to help its original subsystems do their job better.
- Possible issues:
- Sub-optimization.
- Too much centralization.
- Resilience and self-organization are often sacrificed for short-term productivity and stability.
Chapter 4 - Why Systems Surprise Us
- Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so.
- Everything we know about the world is a model, that are congruent but always fall short, causing mistakes and surprises.
- Beguiling Events:
- We are fascinated by the events generated, and we pay too little attention to their history.
- The behaviour of a system is its performance over time, revealing itself as a series of events.
- System structure is the source of system behaviour.
- Nonlinear Relationships:
- Produce unexpected shifts in feedback loops.
- Spruce Budworms example.
- Nonexistent Boundaries:
- The greatest complexities arise exactly at the boundaries.
- There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system.
- There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum.
- Too narrow boundaries == surprises.
- System analysts often make boundaries too large.
- Correct boundaries depends on the problem analyzed.
- Boundaries are of our own making, and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem or purpose.
- Layers of limits:
- The most important input to a system is the one that is most limiting.
- Surprised because we have limited cognitive capacity to understand that multiple inputs produce multiple outputs. So it is not 1 cause == 1 effect, but multiple causes == multiple effects.
- Growth itself depletes or enhances limits, hence changes what is limiting.
- There be always limits to growth, either self-imposed or system-imposed.
- Ubiquitous Delays:
- We are surprised how much time things take.
- Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays.
- To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem.
- Bounded Rationality:
- From Nobel Prize Herbert Simon:
- People make reasonable decisions based on the information they have, but they do not have perfect information, specially from more distant parts of the system.
- We also misinterpret the information that we have.
- Change comes from enlargement of bounded rationality, by providing better, more complete, timelier information.
- Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo.
- For systems to work well, the right feedback must get to the right place at the right time.
- From Nobel Prize Herbert Simon:
Chapter 5 - System Traps ... and Opportunities
- Archetypical problem-generating structures.
- Policy resistance system:
- Various actors pull the system stock towards various goals. The more an actor pulls, the more the other actors need to pull, with everybody expending considerable effort in maintaining a result that nobody likes.
- Example: war on drugs.
- The way out: Let go.
- Align actors to a larger and more important goal.
- Actors to agree and to seek out mutually satisfactory ways for all goals to be realized.
- The tragedy of the Commons:
- Commonly shared erodible resource, that every user benefits directly from, but cost of its abuse are shared by everybody.
- Weak feedback from the condition of the shared resource and its users.
- Overuse, erosion, destruction.
- The way out:
- Education and extortion.
- Privatization to strength the feedback loop.
- Regulation of use.
- Drift to low performance:
- Allow performance standards to be influenced by past performance, specially negative perceived performance, creating a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals.
- The way out:
- Keep performance absolute.
- Make goals sensitive to best historical performance.
- Escalation:
- The state of one stock is determined by trying to surpass the state of another stock -- and viceversa -- creating a reinforcing feedback loop.
- Example: Arms.
- Way out:
- Refuse to compete.
- Negotiate a new system with balancing loops.
- Success to the successful - Competitive Exclusion:
- Winners are systematically reworded with means to win again, a reinforcing loop, where winners will eventually take all.
- Way out:
- Diversification
- Limitation on how much the winner can win (antitrust laws).
- Policies that level the playing field.
- Policies that reward for success that not bias the next round of competition.
- Shifting the burden to the intervenor:
- Intervention reduces the symptoms, but do not address the underlying problem.
- Intervention erodes the self-maintaining capacity of the system, which requires more intervention, creating a destructive reinforcing loop.
- Example: addiction.
- Way out:
- Avoid getting in by strengthening the ability of the system to shoulder its own burdens.
- Take focus off short-term relief to long-term restructuring.
- Rule beating:
- Perverse behaviour that gives appearance of obeying the rules but actually distorts the system.
- Way out:
- Design rules to release to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules.
- Seeking the wrong goal:
- Goals defined inaccurately, may produce results that are not really wanted.
- Way out:
- Define outcomes, not outputs.
Part 3 - Creating Change in Systems and in Our Philosophy
Chapter 6 - Leverage Points - Places to Intervene in a System
- People deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, but often they push the change in the wrong direction.
- Complex systems are counter-intuitive.
- List of leverage points, from less leverage to most leverage:
- Numbers - Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards.
- Little leverage, unless the parameter goes into a range that kick off one of the other leverages on this list.
- They get too much attention as they are short-term.
- Buffers - The sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows.
- Not high leverage as changing the size of buffers is usually hard and costly.
- Stocks-and-Flow Structures - Physical systems and their nodes of intersection.
- The leverage point is proper design in the first place, as rebuilding is slow and expensive.
- Delays - the lengths of the time relative to the rates of system changes.
- Not higher in list because often they are not easy to change.
- Balancing Feedback Loop - The strength of the feedback relative to the impacts they are trying to correct.
- More leverage on information and control than the physical part.
- We understanding the importance of feedback loops that are seldom used, like emergency mechanism.
- Encroaching on our own time for personal rest, recreation, socialization, and meditation.
- Reinforcing feedback loops - the strength of the gain of driving loops.
- A system with an unchecked reinforcing loop ultimately will destroy itself.
- Reducing the gain around a reinforcing loop -- slowing the growth -- is usually a more powerful leverage point than strengthening balancing loops.
- Information flows - the structure of who does and does not have access to information.
- Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction.
- Missing feedback loops are due to humans avoiding accountability.
- Leverage point popular with masses and unpopular with the powers.
- Rules - Incentives, punishments, constraints.
- If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.
- Self-Organization - the power to add, change, or evolve structure.
- In biological systems is called evolution.
- The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience.
- Rules of self-organization.
- Self-organization == evolutionary raw material + experimentation.
- Leverage unpopular point: encourage variability and experimentation.
- Goals - the purpose or function of the system.
- People within system don't often recognize what whole-system goal they are serving.
- Paradigms - the mind-set out of which the system - its goal, structure, rules, delays, parameters - arises.
- Paradigms are the sources of systems.
- There is nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change.
- But whole societies resist paradigm changes harder than anything else.
- How to change paradigms? (Thomas Kuhn):
- Keep pointing anomalies and failures of current paradigm.
- Keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance from the new one.
- Insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power.
- Ignore reactionaries.
- Focus on active change agents and with open-minded people.
- Building a system model forces us to see it whole.
- Transcending paradigms.
- Realizing that no paradigm is "true", hence chase the one that will help to achieve your purpose.
- Numbers - Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards.
- Mastery has less to do with pushing leverage point than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.
Chapter 7 - Living in a World of Systems
- One thing is to understand how to fix a system, quite another to wade in and fix it.
- Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.
- There is always going to be uncertainly.
- Get the beat of the system:
- Before you disturb system, watch how it behaves.
- Start by focusing on the historical facts.
- Expose your mental models to the light of day:
- Write them down to clarify your thoughts.
- Get feedback.
- Honor, respect and distribute information:
- Information is power.
- Use language with care and enrich it with system concepts.
- Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
- Make feedback policies for feedback system:
- Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops - loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These adds learning into the management process.
- Go for the good of the whole.
- Listen to the wisdom of the system:
- Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what is already there.
- Locate responsibility in the system.
- Stay humble, stay a learner.
- Celebrate complexity:
- The universe spends its time in transient behaviour on its way to something else.
- Expand time horizons:
- Don't focus solely in short-term.
- Defy the disciplines:
- Seeing systems whole requires more the being "interdisciplinary".
- Admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.
- Expand the boundary of caring.
- Don't erode the goal of goodness:
- Modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. We are in a "drift to low performance" archetype.
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