## Metadata - Author: [[Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright]] - Full Title: Thinking in Systems - Category: #books ## Highlights - A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system. ([Location 250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=250)) - Most individual and institutional decisions are designed to regulate the levels in stocks. ([Location 311](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=311)) - Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property. ([Location 769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=769)) - Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space. One day it does something it has done a hundred times before and crashes. ([Location 784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=784)) - Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. ([Location 798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=798)) - Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likelyto come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=800)) - Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic. That may explain why hierarchies are so common in the systems nature presents to us. Among all possible complex forms, hierarchies are the only ones that have had the time to evolve.' ([Location 838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=838)) - Systems fool us by presenting themselves-or we fool ourselves by seeing the world-as a series of events. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=894)) - It's endlessly engrossing to take in the world as a series of events, and constantly surprising, because that way of seeing the world has almost no predictive or explanatory value. ([Location 898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=898)) - 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. That's because long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why. ([Location 904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=904)) - Systems thinking goes back and forth constantly between structure (diagrams of stocks, flows, and feedback) and behavior (time graphs). ([Location 910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=910)) - The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries. There are Czechs on the German side of the border and Germans on the Czech side of the border. Forest species extend beyond the edge of the forest into the field; field species penetrate partway into the forest. Disorderly, mixed-up borders are sources of diversity and creativity. ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=987)) - The lesson of boundaries is hard even for systems thinkers to get. There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we've artificially created them. ([Location 1011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1011)) - Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem. We are rarely that flexible. We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to. Think how many arguments have to do with boundaries-national boundaries, trade boundaries, ethnic boundaries, boundaries between public and private responsibility, and boundaries between the rich and the poor, polluters and pollutees, people alive now and people who will come in the future. ([Location 1026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1026)) - The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends-usually-on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand. ([Location 1088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1088)) - The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource. ([Location 1247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1247)) - GNP is a measure of throughput-flows of stuff made and purchased in a year-rather than capital stocks, the houses and cars and computers and stereos that are the source of real wealth and real pleasure. It could be argued that the best society would be one in which capital stocks can bemaintained and used with the lowest possible throughput, rather than the highest. ([Location 1510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1510)) - You have the problem of wrong goals when you findsomething stupid happening "because it's the rule." You have the problem of rule beating when you find something stupid happening because it's the way around the rule. ([Location 1521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1521)) - Numbers, the sizes of flows, are dead last on my list of powerful interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably 90-no 95, no 99 percent-of our attention goes to parameters, but there's not a lot of leverage in them. ([Location 1579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1579)) - There's more leverage in slowing the system down so technologies and prices can keep up with it, than there is in wishing the delays would go away. ([Location 1633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1633)) - The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved and accumulated over billions of years, is the source of evolutionary potential, just as science libraries and labs and universities where scientists are trained are the source of technological potential. Allowing species to go extinct is a systems crime, just as randomly eliminating all copies of particular science journals or particular kinds of scientists would be. ([Location 1730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1730)) - So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.' 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. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. ([Location 1778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1778)) - Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole. I say that because my own paradigms have been changed that way. ([Location 1781](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1781)) - Social systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. Changing them is not as simple as saying "now all change," or of trusting that he who knows the good shall do the good. ([Location 1812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1812)) - You don't have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, although doing so is a good practice. You can do it with words or lists or pictures or arrows showing what you think is connected to what. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. ([Location 1877](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1877)) - 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. ([Location 1880](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1880)) - A society that talks incessantly about "productivity" but that hardly understands, much less uses, the word "resilience" is going to become productive and not resilient. A society that doesn't understand or use the term "carrying capacity" will exceed its carrying capacity. A society that talks about "creating jobs" as if that's something only companies can do will not inspire the great majority of its people to create jobs, for themselves or anyone else. Nor will it appreciate its workers for their role in "creating profits." And of course a society that talks about a "Peacekeeper" missile or "collateral damage," a "Final Solution" or "ethnic cleansing," is speaking what Wendell Berry calls "tyrannese" ([Location 1904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1904)) - 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 intervenor 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. ([Location 1952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001OC6NS6&location=1952))