Thinking in systems, Donella Meadows (2008)
/But for people interested in community building there is a gem hidden at the end of the book, which many may leave undiscovered, should they get lost in a thicket of examples about how systems work. Here, in the final chapter, Meadows presents her “most general ‘systems wisdoms’” that she has gained from her years of experience.
These are the take-home lessons, the concepts and practices that penetrate the discipline of systems so deeply that one begins, however imperfectly, to practice them not just in one’s profession, but in all of life. They are the behavioral consequences of a worldview based on the ideas of feedback, nonlinearity, and systems responsible for their own behavior.
Here are just a few excerpts. The rest is highly worth reading.
• Get the beat of the system
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. […] If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time tell you what has happened. […]
This guideline is deceptively simple. Until you make it a practice, you won’t believe how many wrong turns it helps you avoid. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others.
• Expose your mental models to the light of day
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. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them to be plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity.
• Honor, respect, and distribute information
You’ve seen how information holds systems together and how delayed, biased, scattered, or missing information can make feedback loops malfunction. Decision makers can’t respond to information they don’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.
If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.
• Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important that what we can’t measure. [But] pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already see the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than what is important. [For instance, in Soviet Russia in the 1930s there was a quota for the total square meters of glass produced. The result was lots of very thin, very breakable glass that met the quota without needing increased raw materials.] So don’t fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality. Be a quality director. Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality.
If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass. Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. 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 and absence, they will cease to exist.
• Listen to the wisdom of the system
Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Notice how many of those forces and structures are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Don’t be an unthinking inventor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.
• Expand the boundary of caring
Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, […].
As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know.