I have been told with great authority that milk price was going up when it was going down, that real interest rates were falling when they were rising, that the deficit was a higher fraction of the GNP than ever before when it wasn’t. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing-the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too. It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. Peoples’ memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.īefore you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If it’s a piece of music or a white-water rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. Get the beat.īefore you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. But here, as a start-off dancing lesson, are the practices I see my colleagues adopting, consciously or unconsciously, as they encounter systems. The list probably isn’t complete, because I am still a student in the school of systems. 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. I will summarize the most general “systems wisdom” I have absorbed from modeling complex systems and from hanging out with modelers.
Donella meadows thinking in systems diagream full#
It requires our full humanity-our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.īut there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. All those endeavors require one to stay wide-awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. But we can dance with them (see “The Dance”)! I already knew that, in a way, before I began to study systems. We can’t control systems or figure them out. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however-waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do? We can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.įor those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can’t optimize we don’t even know what to optimize. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. They are understandable only in the most general way. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.īut self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable.Make feedback policies for feedback systems.Expose your mental models to the open air.