Thinking in Systems – A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows
Who should read this book?
This should be compulsory literature for any politician 
. In a broader context, I firmly believe that anyone engaged in formulating a ‘strategy’ should possess a fundamental understanding of the principles of systems thinking. This includes executives, program managers, change managers, HR managers, consultants, and others. The applications are broad. Understanding these concepts in invaluable in various situations. It helps to build a more sustainable and resilient future.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
The book serves as an excellent introduction to systems thinking. It delves into theoretical, abstract, practical, and philosophical dimensions. Immersing oneself in its pages reshapes one’s perspective, emphasizing the ability to perceive the world from various angles.
While it may not be the easiest read, primarily due to its abstract nature. It does not contain complex mathematical or theoretical explanations and no prerequisite knowledge is required.
Within its pages, readers will encounter profound insights and approaches to tackle several challenges, including:
- Tragedy of the Commons: Understanding the dynamics of shared resource management and the collective action problem.
- Bounded Reality: Exploring the limitations of individual perception and decision-making.
- Rule Beating: Examining how systems can adapt and evolve to subvert intended rules or regulations.
- Success to the Successful: Analyzing the phenomenon where those who are already successful tend to receive disproportionate benefits.
- Policy Resistance: Unraveling the complexities of resistance to policy changes and why well-intentioned efforts may fail.
- Taxes: Gaining insights into the implications of taxation within complex systems.
In summary, this book offers an enlightening journey into systems thinking, shedding light on multifaceted concepts without burdening readers with intricate theory or mathematics, making it accessible to all curious minds.
Interesting extracts
“The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:
- Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.
- Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.
- The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.
- The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.
- Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through understanding addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.”
“And then the well-intentioned fixer pulls the lever in the wrong direction! This is just one example of how we can be surprised by the counterintuitive behavior of systems when we start trying to change them. Part of the problem here is that the car dealer has been reacting not too slowly, but too quickly. Given the configuration of this system, she has been overreacting. Things would go better if, instead of decreasing her response delay from three days to two, she would increase the delay from three days to six.”
“The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows. Therefore, we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate. Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oilbased economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it. Similarly, a company can build up a larger workforce by more hiring, or it can do the same thing by reducing the rates of quitting and firing. These two strategies may have very different costs. The wealth of a nation can be boosted by investment to build up a larger stock of factories and machines. It also can be boosted, often more cheaply, by decreasing the rate at which factories and machines wear out, break down, or are discarded.”
“Fable. There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus. Both of them made fine watches, and they both had many customers. People dropped into their stores, and their phones rang constantly with new orders. Over the years, however, Hora prospered, while Tempus became poorer and poorer. That’s because Hora discovered the principle of hierarchy. . . . The watches made by both Hora and Tempus consisted of about one thousand parts each. Tempus put his together in such a way that if he had one partly assembled and had to put it down—to answer the phone, say—it fell to pieces. When he came back to it, Tempus would have to start all over again. The more his customers phoned him, the harder it became for him to find enough uninterrupted time to finish a watch. Hora’s watches were no less complex than those of Tempus, but he put together stable subassemblies of about ten elements each. Then he put ten of these subassemblies together into a larger assembly; and ten of those assemblies constituted the whole watch. Whenever Hora had to put down a partly completed watch to answer the phone, he lost only a small part of his work. So he made his watches much faster and more efficiently than did Tempus. 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.
(…) Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions, not only because they give a system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system has to keep track of. In hierarchical systems relationships within each subsystem are denser and stronger than relationships between subsystems. Everything is still connected to everything else, but not equally strongly. People in the same university department talk to each other more than they talk to people in other departments. The cells that constitute the liver are in closer communication with each other than they are with the cells of the heart. If these differential information links within and between each level of the hierarchy are designed right, feedback delays are minimized. No level is overwhelmed with information. The system works with efficiency and resilience.”
“ Soil erosion can proceed for a long time without much affect on crop yield—until the topsoil is worn down to the depth of the root zone of the crop. Beyond that point, a little further erosion can cause yields to plummet. (…) Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.”
“The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries.”
“There are many reinforcing feedback loops in society that reward the winners of a competition with the resources to win even bigger next time—the ‘success to the successful’ trap. Rich people collect interest; poor people pay it. Rich people pay accountants and lean on politicians to reduce their taxes; poor people can’t. Rich people give their kids inheritances and good educations. Antipoverty programs are weak balancing loops that try to counter these strong reinforcing ones. It would be much more effective to weaken the reinforcing loops. That’s what progressive income tax, inheritance tax, and universal high-quality public education programs are meant to do. If the wealthy can influence government to weaken, rather than strengthen, those measures, then the government itself shifts from a balancing structure to one that reinforces success to the successful!”
“The rules of the system define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom. (…) If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.”
“Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet. The intervention point here is obvious, but unpopular. Encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity means ‘losing control.’ Let a thousand flowers bloom and anything could happen! Who wants that? Let’s play it safe and push this lever in the wrong direction by wiping out biological, cultural, social, and market diversity!”
“People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control. (…) Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best.”
“Make Feedback Policies for Feedback Systems. (…) You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting feedback system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops—loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process.”