Thinking in Systems

Did you try to change the way your organization or your team work? What did you do? What was the impact? Spend 10 minutes reading this page and think about your situation while reading it. Email me your feedback/suggestions.

This page is a summary of Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows.

thinking-in-systems.png

Places to Intervene in an Organization

Places to intervene in a system, or leverage points, allows you to change things in your organization. Below are the leverage points sorted by the most effective to least and Here is a blog post with examples.

  1. The power to transcend paradigms.
  2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
  3. The goals of the system.
  4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
  5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
  6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
  7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
  8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
  9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
  10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
  11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
  12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).

Traps In an Organization

Traps are things that change the direction of your organization away from it's goals. Below are the names of the traps and here is a blog post with examples.

Quotes From the Book

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment

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.

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

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 offi cials. 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.

Other Resources

Envisioning a Sustainable World

Donella H. Meadows talked about the need for building a responsible vision before policies and implementation. She also demonstrate how to develop a vision, using something that feels like a type of meditation. 30 min video and in a Text format.