thinking in systems: a primer review

10 Dec thinking in systems: a primer review

In systems thinking, the system is more than a sum of the parts. The book is odd in that it was published posthumously. To act only when a problem becomes obvious is to miss an important opportunity to solve the problem. Systems are the same way. Stocks act as delays or buffers or shock absorbers in systems. Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows: This is the one I’ve recommended, referenced and gifted the most. The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. Paradigms are shared opinions, not facts. Those components are the elements of the system, the way that they’re connected, and the purpose of the system. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. For instance, the Dead Sea has a flow of the Jordan River as an input. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within. When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential. One of the problems with early file-based ISAM databases was a record being updated in one file and not in another. The stock is the size of the Dead Sea itself –the water contained in it. The initial chapter lays out the world of systems, the second chapter explains some basic terminology of systems like stock, flows and feedback. The purpose is also the most difficult to observe. Changing the players in the system is a low-level intervention, as long as the players fit into the same old system. Creating the Next Industrial Revolution Publishers Weekly, Starred Review- Just before … It seems our ability to see – and accept – delays is an important part of our success in this world. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. But beware, unlike many others, this book offers no easy solutions. This eliminates the inherent delay between the rider recognizing the path of the bull and signaling the horse to go in that direction. Complex behaviors of systems often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift, causing first one loop and then another to dominate behavior. The article reviews the book "Thinking in Systems: A Primer," by Donella H. Meadows, edited by Diana Wright. It's… your friend Joel's digital garden. There is an integrity or wholeness about a system and an active set of mechanisms to maintain that integrity. Basic primer for systems thinking I've read many of the books mentioned as references in this audiobook. January 2014; ... together with the adjunct field of systems thinking which emerged subsequently. The world is a continuum. Part of that is based on the bounded rationality of the individual players in the system. … confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes in designing systems around the wrong goal. It can be found only by letting go of more narrow goals and considering the long-term welfare of the entire system. Rodin, Judith // Foreign Affairs;Nov/Dec2010, Vol. 0 Comment Report abuse Doug Atha. Any competent financial analyst will tell you to spread out your investments into a variety of industries and types of investment. A stock governed by linked reinforcing and balancing loops will grow exponentially if the reinforcing loop dominates the balancing one. A valuable primer to Systems Thinking This book is a gives a helpful introduction to the framework & principles of systems thinking. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. However, people pay for the convenience of having a bottle of water. (It also speaks to not having information overload as The Information Diet.) This is even more deep than goals and is the source of systems. (See Pervasive Information Architecture for our need to learn through concrete things.). Because the TSA made you throw out the bottle you had when you went to the gate – and because you’re thirsty and that’s the only option. A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate. It’s an easy read and the chapter structure aids the acquisition of knowledge in chunks that, at the same time, work for the noob and provide the opportunity of quick recall for the expert. However, this is what we often do in optimization. Thinking in Systems ends with 12 leverage points in reverse order of impact as follows: It’s incredibly unfortunate that Donella Meadows passed away before completing Thinking in Systems – but very fortunate that her work was eventually published. I had the pleasure recently of meeting a rodeo champion. Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. We make one big bet on how a technology will work. The only hope for seeing connections between different parts of the system is to observe the system in action. Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. Subtly changing a rule can dramatically change how a system operates. It’s possible that there’s one espoused purpose – and an entirely different actual purpose. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. That’s why pilots are taught to get winds reports – but also to look at smoke from smokestacks and the ways that trees are bending in the wind to be able to get an approximation of the way that the wind is blowing through indirect means. However, the risks are big with this approach. April 28, 2014 / 1 Comment / in Book Review, Professional / by Robert Bogue. Thinking in Systems: A Primer by pioneering environmental scientist Donella H. Meadows is a concise and profound textbook that teaches readers how to develop the ability to think in systems. This means that the economy will move in cycles regardless of what political leaders do. The relationship between cause and effect can only be drawn with curves or wiggles, not with a straight line. It is a basic book which covers only the most basic principles of systems thinking and modelling. There is no other outlet of the Dead Sea. If the winners of a competition are systematically rewarded with the means to win again, a reinforcing feedback loop is created by which, if it is allowed to proceed uninhibited, the winners eventually take all, while the losers are eliminated. One of the challenges that happens when trying to infer the behavior of a system is that you believe that What You See is all there is (WYSIATI). But they don’t have perfect information, especially about more distant parts of the system. System behavior is particularly sensitive to the goals of feedback loops. You can’t extract just part of the complex system update, you have to take it all – or none of it. There is so much that isn’t directly visible without careful observations. A linear relationship between two elements in a system can be drawn on a graph with a straight line. A lot of the theory about teams and organizations has emerged from the principles of systems thinking, and this book explains those principles very effectively. In most cases elements are tangible. Bounded rationality is about the rational decisions that we make based on the information at hand. Systems consist of stocks and flows. Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material—a highly variable stock of information from which to select possible patterns—and a means for experimentation, for selecting and testing new patterns. Harmonization of goals in a system is not always possible. The resultant “bounded rationality” of actors in systems is a major cause of all the confusion we see in the world around us. However, when problems arise those critical components which were cut can’t kick in to keep the system from collapsing. Systems have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. It will level off if the two loops are of equal strength. modelling complex technical systems like meshes of water hoses. Years ago while speaking about databases terms we talked about atomic transactions. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! Some folks actually pay for the extra purification but mostly its convenience. 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. It warns against false causalities, simplistic explanations, and impulsive action just as it exhorts empathy and humility in our intellectual endeavours. A stock takes time to change, because flows take time to flow – Results are lagging indicators of processes. This is part of why wicked problems (See Dialogue Mapping and The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices) are wicked. Review of Thinking in Systems: A Primer. If you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior. (See How Children Succeed, Introducing Psychology of Success, and The Information Diet for Walter Mischel’s famous test.) Self-Organization—The power to add, change, or evolve system structure is a powerful way of introducing resilience into the system. The higher and faster you grow, the farther and faster you fall, when you’re building up a capital stock dependent on a nonrenewable resource. More than teaching the technicalities, the author places a far greater importance on exposing the rich, complicated, and unexpected nature of real world systems through day-to-day examples. The thrust that the engines are producing is being converted into lift by the wings, but in a non-obvious way. Rules to govern a system can lead to rule beating—perverse behavior that gives the appearance of obeying the rules or achieving the goals, but that actually distorts the system. The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries. Hope they convince you to get your own copy ASAP! D; 05-20-19 No diagrams Promising, but couldn't get far without the non-existent illustrations. It looks great to the people getting a loan on the house but it led to the balancing loops in the system being insufficient to catch the fall. A system is a set of interlinked elements organized to achieve a goal. Search the Blog. More difficult to see is the purpose of the system. They have an all or nothing component of them. System structure is the source of system behavior. Bounded rationality allows for some seemingly nonsensical results. I gave this book 5 stars not just because the contents are incredibly useful, but also because it reads as smoothly as any well written novel. She unexpectedly died in 2001 and in 2008 the book was finally brought to print. Nearly everything that we have ever run across can be dissected into smaller and smaller units. Of course we all know that airplanes are designed for transportation – but that’s because we’ve seen them in action. Our bank balance is our stock of money. I’m glad that it did. The solution to minimizing the impact of bounded reality is to create greater awareness of the overall system and how it works. Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have. The simple test of whether a child could wait a few minutes for two marshmallows instead of one could indicate better than sophisticated instruments designed to measure a child’s intelligence, their success later in life. However, more than allowing the rider to focus on the rope, a delay – the delay between recognizing the motion of the bull and correcting the horse’s motion – has been removed. The resilience in the system of financial markets is in the form of fail safes against individuals taking actions that can be individually beneficial but harmful to the overall market – like offering home loans to people who couldn’t afford them. That’s one of the reasons why we’re more concerned about our bank account balances than the amount we pay for cable each month. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Thinking in Systems: A Primer at Amazon.com. Verified Purchase. While systems may be influenced by external forces, the way they respond to these forces tend to come from their inherent characteristics. These beliefs are unstated because it is unnecessary to state them—everyone already knows them. If the goals—the indicators of satisfaction of the rules—are defined inaccurately or incompletely, the system may obediently work to produce a result that is not really intended or wanted. The reduced delay minimizes the oscillations and optimizes the system to improve performance. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Thinking in Systems: A Primer at Amazon.com. If you have ever heard the phrase “all technical problems are people problems” – this book will make it clear exactly why that is. What is most frequently cut when optimizing is anything that’s not directly related to output but sometimes the secondary loops and support structure is necessary to support the system once things start to go wrong. Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation. The next section covers the properties of complex systems in some details and explains how the principles for feedback loops and stocks lead to a rich diversity of nonlinear behaviour and how the human mind is singularly ill-equipped to comprehend all these forces acting on each other. The presence of stocks allows inflows and outflows to be independent of each other and temporarily out of balance with each other. Balancing Feedback Loops—The strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct can help keep stocks in safe bounds. Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. Transcending Paradigms – By transcending paradigms you can see individual systems for their limitations and put different systems together to get richer results. Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. In my mind, systems thinking can really change the way we think about international development, in general but especially in fragile states. Taking apart a system should be easy. But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource. A nonlinear relationship is one in which the cause does not produce a proportional effect. Reinforcing loops are found wherever a system element has the ability to reproduce itself or to grow as a constant fraction of itself. Even non-physical information takes time to feedback into the system. They study people’s behavior around money. Chapter 7, “Living in a World of Systems,” was originally ... systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well. However, the actual purpose is to provide high-risk loans to people. Delays are pervasive in systems, and they are strong determinants of behavior. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Thinking in Systems: A Primer at Amazon.com. Information Flows—The structure of who does and does not have access to information can reduce malfunctions of human and non-human systems. If you want to understand the world we live in and the systems that exist all around us, Thinking in System : A Primer is an absolutely essential starting point. The connections and the purpose are much more important. Every system has delays in it. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. It may seem like a subtle distinction but it’s not. Reinforcing Feedback Loops—The strength of the gain of driving loops which cause the system to want to go out of control – either positively or negatively. Reducing buffers increases efficiency (optimization) by reducing resilience. Book Review-Thinking in Systems: A Primer. One of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants. Locate Responsibility in the System That’s a guideline both for analysis and design. Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. If you’re looking at an airplane you can see the engines and the trust and you can observe the plane in flight, but it’s not obvious how the shape of the wings (camber) relates to the amount of lift generated. You have to take the whole of the system you can’t take the pieces. known for the Meadows Report, aka Limits to Growth in 1970 for the Club of Rome. One of the names that comes up often is Donella Meadows and her connection to MIT and Jay Forrester and System Dynamics. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. That is that a transaction should either completely succeed or fail. Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be independent and temporarily out of balance with each other. During the United States housing bubble financial instruments that were intended to be stable based on the way they were constructed were slowly rearranged and in the process the security offered by them were no longer resilient against market downturns. We eliminate the parts of the system that we don’t think are necessary because it’s just taking energy to keep operational and isn’t returning value. The more that we understand about systems the more we can understand about the organizations we work in, the communities that we live in, and the world as a whole. This is used in the subsequent chapter to showcase some typical system structures in what Domella calls the “Systems Zoo”. 5.0 out of 5 stars Book for work. 1 Issue 3, p100 . I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review. In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystems. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders … The reason for this is simple. Of these, components of a system the elements component is the one where they are easiest to see. The book draft was written in 1993 but was never published. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system. Edited by the Sustainability Institute?s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.Some of the biggest problems facing the world?war, hunger, poverty, and environmental … We can celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. 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. If subsystems can largely take care of themselves, regulate themselves, maintain themselves, and yet serve the needs of the larger system, while the larger system coordinates and enhances the functioning of the subsystems, a stable, resilient, and efficient structure results. When I reread The Fifth Discipline and wrote a book review for it, I found a few references to Donella Meadows and upon further research I found the book Thinking in Systems. Understanding more about how a system works leads you to the opportunity to leverage the system to make changes that are in everyone’s best interests. Book Review: "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella H. Meadows don mikulecky Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.) The exception to that rule is at the top, where a single player can have the power to change the system’s goal. The instant there is a change the system doesn’t instantly change. Don’t be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. The espoused purpose is to sell cars. Everything is still connected to everything. Paradigms—The mind-set out of which the system—its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters—arises. I have tried to best to apply the lens of systems thinking to my long-time experience of capacity building and institutional strengthening in Afghanistan, and presented a paper on this topic at the Santa Fe institute of Complexity Science. Magical leverage points are not easily accessible, even if we know where they are and which direction to push on them. There numerous theories about what the rocks were used for. It also has rain as an input. Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. Consider your paycheck. Reviewed in Canada on January … Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought … 6. A powerful introduction to systems … The cows graze off of common land. The book is odd in that it was published posthumously. These high-risk loans come with higher interest rates designed to be profitable for the car dealer. Thinking in Systems is a wonderful book by Donella H. Meadows who was an environmental scientist. As much as Singe’s work made systems thinking popular, Meadows work was much richer and deeper than was possible with The Fifth Discipline. Companies that lose market share would’ve done so regardless of how competitors respond. Stock with Two Competing Balancing Loops—a Thermostat, Stock with One Reinforcing Loop and One Balancing Loop—Population and Industrial Economy, A Renewable Stock Constrained by a Nonrenewable Stock—an Oil Economy, Renewable Stock Constrained by a Renewable Stock—a Fishing Economy. Systems fool us by presenting themselves—or we fool ourselves by seeing the world—as a series of events. One exception is on a discontinuity where a small numeric change causes the system to operate differently. A person can be broken down into organs, cells, molecules, atoms, protons, quarks, etc. Boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. 4 people found this helpful Overall 1 out of 5 stars. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Systems happen all at once. It’s possible to believe at first glance that learning from The Fifth Discipline might be enough, but systems thinking was only one of the disciplines – it didn’t get the depth that it deserves as a way of thinking that can change your effectiveness. It has an output of evaporation. For instance, you can see a duck on the surface of the water but you can’t see how much – or little – the duck is paddling underneath the water. It is fascinating to explore what remarkable behaviours can emerge even with very simple arrangements of water, taps, and bathtubs! Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users. Numbers—Constants and parameters such as subsidies, taxes, standards. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. I have written before about modelling complex technical systems like meshes of water hoses, but this book is the master class in that way of thinking about absolutely everything in the world. Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Stocks are batteries or reserve. Story 3 out of 5 stars. Own a 10-page reference in the appendix that nicely summarizes all the key takeaways from the book. close. Pervasive Information Architecture spoke of how giving actors real wine instead of colored water allowed them to focus on their performance and not have to deal with the distraction of pretending colored water was wine. It’s not surprising that being able to see the individual elements of the system is the easiest part of the process of understanding a system. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Overall, the … Surely one more cow won’t be a problem – until all of the other farmers make the same individually rational decision. You take an action and then there’s a delay before the response. One of the big mistakes we make is to strip away “emergency” response mechanisms because they aren’t often used and they appear to be costly.. Written by the late Donnella H Meadows. He’s a trainer of students trying to become better at Rodeo but also of horses. Insight comes not only from recognizing which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enhances limits and therefore changes what is limiting. If the horse follows the bull automatically then the rider can focus on the rope and not have to worry about guiding the horse. Thinking in Systems, a Primer is good reading for everybody. Yet in its description of complexity, its admission of "it's effing difficult", its many … They are resilient, and many of them are evolutionary. 5.0 out of 5 stars Everything we see, hear, and do is part of a system that needs to be understood. Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows. Change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself. You can’t work on just one part of the problem, you have to work on the entire system at once – and all of the relationships between all of the parts. Changes in stocks set the pace of the dynamics of systems. A primer to systems thinking indeed! That mechanism operates through a feedback loop. 89 Issue 6, p202 Seeing purpose in the behavior of a system is somewhat like trying to see the wind blow. ... Background. 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. Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows is an absolutely wonderful introduction to the world of systems and systems thinking. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time. All models, system diagrams, and descriptions, whether mental models or mathematical, are simplifications of the real world. One of the things that he explained was that the horses were trained to follow the bulls. The book begins its narrative by introducing a concept of simple systems, as illustrated by a thermostat which controls the temperature in a room. 1 Review. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate. Unless w… We saw this in Diffusion of Innovations and The Fifth Discipline as the law of unintended consequences. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate (limited mainly by extraction capital). In this way, even observing a river doesn’t make transparent all of the factors influencing it. Renewable resources are flow-limited. Even when they’re not tangible – they’re things like pride and identity – they’re still relatively easy for our concrete focused minds to understand. You can’t directly see which way the wind is blowing, however, as a pilot knowing the wind direction and speed can be important. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Performance 3 out of 5 stars. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior. At distribution but this leads to more outages down into organs, cells, molecules, atoms protons... Wonderful introduction to the rates of system changes world of systems eliminates the delay! Our profitability state them—everyone already knows them boundary of an iceberg is above the water fountain get. Not to grow forever but to decide what Limits to growth in 1970 the! Summarizes all the key takeaways from the book two or three weeks you! Trained to follow the bulls we drastically narrow the range of disruptions trying. Discussion—The questions we want to ask be found only by letting go of more narrow goals and the... Growth in 1970 for the time you ’ ve worked that encourage,... Often is Donella Meadows and her connection to MIT and Jay Forrester and system Dynamics a! Rider can focus on the rope and not in another simplistic explanations, and sometimes evolutionary behavior environment. Relationship between cause and effect can only be drawn with curves or,... Great deal of power over systems and optimizes the system run itself have an all or nothing of... Defies control by its very nature within a variable environment this way, even a. As it exhorts empathy and humility in our intellectual endeavours M. // world Review. Language and examples throughout the book closes with some heartfelt advice on being an effective systems thinker ( or kind! Equal strength goals—the purpose or function of successful systems the amount of inventory at distribution but this to... 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