Thinking In Systems: A Primer Quotes
"Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes."
"A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time."
"The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you."
"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
"Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries, and attend to their own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of nonliving things."
"You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'"
"A stock is the memory of the history of changing flows within the system."
"Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents—preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances."
"The most important delay in this system is the one that is not under the direct control of the car dealer."
"Changing the delays in a system can make it much easier or much harder to manage."
"You can see why system thinkers are somewhat fanatic on the subject of delays."
"We can’t begin to understand the dynamic behavior of systems unless we know where and how long the delays are."
"Lengthening or shortening them can produce major changes in the behavior of systems."
"In the big picture, one store’s inventory problem may seem trivial and fixable."
"Increased production increases the number of jobs allowing more people to buy cars."
"That’s a reinforcing loop, which also works in the opposite direction."
"The larger system, with interconnected industries responding to each other through delays, is the primary cause of business cycles."
"Economies are full of balancing feedback loops with delays, and they are inherently oscillatory."
"In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth."
"A Renewable Stock Constrained by a Nonrenewable Stock—an Oil Economy."
"Any real physical entity is always surrounded by and exchanging things with its environment."
"Growth in a constrained environment is very common."
"We know those balancing loops are there, even if they are not yet dominating the system’s behavior."
"Systems need to be managed not only for productivity or stability, they also need to be managed for resilience."
"Resilience is a measure of a system’s ability to survive and persist within a variable environment."
"Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops."
"The ability to recover strength, spirits, good humor, or any other aspect quickly."
"Everything we think we know about the world is a model."
"Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world."
"Our models fall far short of representing the world fully."
"The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance."
"Linear relationships are easy to think about: the more the merrier."
"Nonlinear systems generally cannot be solved and cannot be added together."
"Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules."
"In our heads, we can keep track of only a few variables at one time."
"If a system is a big black box, we can find out only what goes in and what comes out."
"If this relation’s good and stable then to predict we may be able."
"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."
"At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting."
"There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed."
"When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential."
"Bounded rationality means that people make quite reasonable decisions based on the information they have."
"We are blundering "satisficers," attempting to meet our needs well enough."
"Change comes first from stepping outside the limited information that can be seen from any single place in the system."
"A free market does allow producers and consumers to make fairly uninhibited and locally rational decisions."
"To paraphrase a common prayer: God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately."
"The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole."
"Rational elites know everything about their technical or scientific worlds, but lack a broader perspective."
"Being less surprised by complex systems is mainly a matter of learning to expect, appreciate, and use the world’s complexity."
"Understanding archetypal problem-generating structures is not enough. They need to be changed."
"In a policy-resistant system with actors pulling in different directions, everyone expends considerable effort in maintaining a result that no one wants."
"The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the resource users."
"Allowing performance standards to be influenced by past performance sets up a reinforcing feedback loop of eroding goals."
"The best way out of escalation is to avoid getting in it. If caught, one can refuse to compete (unilaterally disarm)."
"If the winners of a competition are systematically rewarded with the means to win again, a reinforcing feedback loop is created."
"Shifting the burden, dependence, and addiction arise when a solution to a systemic problem reduces the symptoms, but does nothing to solve the underlying problem."
"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."
"If the goal of a society is GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless those goals are explicitly defined and pursued."
"To understand the power of rules, I like to ask my students to imagine different ones for a college."
"They are high leverage points. Power over the rules is real power."
"It is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations."
"The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do is to change themselves utterly."
"Self-organization means changing any aspect of a system lower on this list."
"The power of self-organization seems so wondrous that we tend to regard it as mysterious, miraculous, heaven sent."
"These rules basically govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions."
"Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material."
"If you want the room warmer, you know the thermostat setting is the place to intervene."
"The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being."