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systems
So, what is a system? 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 system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows
Systems are composed of:
- Elements
- Interconnections
- A function or purpose
Qualities of a system:
- Resiliency
- Self-Organization
- Hierarchy
Systems:
- Have STRUCTURE...
- that generates BEHAVIORS...
- which create EVENTS.
Feedback loops can be:
- Balancing (goal seeking)
- Reinforcing (multiplying)
Feedback is time travel. It can only describe what happened. Adjustment based on feedback will effect the future. It won't fix the present.
Delays: A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes a system likely to oscillate.
"High leverage, wrong direction" -- the car dealer found a highly effective lever, but pulled it in the wrong direction by shortening her delays, and worsened her oscillations. She flattened her curves by increasing the delay.
When industry sprays insecticides, it shifts the whole system to balance uneasily on different points within its nonlinear relationships. It kills off not only the pest, but the natural enemies of the pest, thereby weakening the feedback loop that normally keeps the budworms in check. It keeps the density of fir high, moving the budworms up their nonlinear reproduction curve to the point at which they're perpetually on the edge of population explosion.
The forest management practices have set up what Holling calls "persistent semi-outbreak conditions" over larger and larger areas. The managers have found themselves locked into a policy in which there is an incipient volcano bubbling, such that, if the policy fails, there will be an outbreak of an intensity that has never been seen before."
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows
See also: the law of eristic escalation
If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment but allocates little money or effort toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows
The purpose of a system is what it does
Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows
When a subsystem dominates an oversystem, that is suboptimization.
When an oversystem has too much control over the internal working of a subsystem, that is overcontrol. i.e. micromanagement. Everybody hates that.
- Everything we think we know about the world is a model.
- Our models do have a strong congruence with the world.
- Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Donella H. Meadows
- Policy Resistance
- Tragedy of the Commons
- Success to the Successful
- Seeking the Wrong Goal
- Measuring the wrong thing
- Shifting Responsibility to the Intervener (Addiction)
- Eroding Standards
- Breaking Rules
- Escalation
Most to least effective
- Transcending Paradigm
- Paradigm Change
- Goals
- Self Organization
- Rules
- Information Flow
- Reinforcing Loops
- Balancing Loops
- Delays
- Structure
- Buffers
- Numbers / Constants
%T Thinking in systems: a primer
%A Meadows, Donella
%A Wright, Diana
%D 2008
%I Chelsea Green Publishing
%X 9781603580557