Donella Meadows: Systems Thinking

Increasing effectiveness of intervention to the system:

12. Constants, parameters, numbers.

11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.

10. The structure of material stocks and flows.

9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.

8. The strength of negative feedback loops.

7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.

6. The structure of information flows.

5. The rules of the system.

4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.

3. The goals of the system.

2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.

1. The power to transcend paradigms. 

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.

Interesting: Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.

The basic operating unit of a system is a feedback loop.

The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems

Systems are why things so often happen much faster or slower than everyone thinks they will. And why you can be doing something that has always worked and suddenly discover, to your great disappointment, that your action no longer works. 

I don’t think the systems way of seeing is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary, and therefore revealing. You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, it just helps you see understand the world around you. 

Once you start listing the elements of a system, there is almost no end to the process. You can divide elements into sub-elements and then sub-sub-elements. Pretty soon you lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees

Interconnections in systems can be 

Physical flows - such as water in the tree’s trunk

Flows of information - signals that go to decision or action points in the system

The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see

how the system behaves.

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.

Purposes are deduced from behavior, not stated goals.

Very interesting: changing the elements has very little effect on the system: a school has different students every year and is the same system.

If the interconnections change, the system may be greatly altered: if students are graded on looks all of a sudden. 

Changes in function can also be drastic: if a school’s purpose becomes making money.

The parts of the system we are most likely to notice—its elements—are often least important in understanding the system’s behavior. 

There can be multiple inflows and multiple outflows.

A stock is a collection. A flow is a movement, a growth or a decline.

The volume of wood in the living trees in a forest is a stock. Its inflow is the growth of the trees. Its outflows are the natural deaths of trees and the harvest by loggers. The logging harvest flows into another stock, perhaps an inventory of lumber at a mill. Wood flows out of the inventory stock as lumber sold to customers.

You can think about the behavior of the stock and the flow in a graphical manner. Think about a tub of water in a steady state. You pull the plug and half of the water drains out, then start the tap such that the inflow equals the outflow. Imagine what the stock of water in the tub looks like. But also think about what the flow looks like, because on is steady and one is moving. 

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.

We never think about this easy side of the equation: 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.

You can adjust the drain or faucet of a bathtub—the flows—abruptly, but it is much more difficult to change the level of water—the stock—quickly.

Stocks do not change quickly because they are the sum of a many previous flows. Flows take time to flow. 

Your self-esteem is a stock. Even if you wake up today and commit to a large positive change, you must understand that you are changing the flow. If the stock is largely negative, it will get positive much faster than before you made the decision, but it will still be a long time until the stock’s value is positive. 

Interesting: stocks give us freedom to make decisions that aren’t restricted by the short term.

A reservoir allows farmers to live without worrying about differences in the inflows and outflows of the nearby river. In fact, having a reservoir allows them to make decisions that allow for corrective actions before the water level gets too high or low.

This is FEEDBACK. Having a stock allows us to correct changes to flows before big changes to stocks are realized. 

This was thought-provoking: a reason why some people get rich and some stay poor

As your level of available cash in the checking account (a stock) goes down, you may decide to work more hours and earn more money. The money entering your bank account is a flow that you can adjust in order to increase your stock of cash to a more desirable level. If your bank account then grows very large, you may feel free to work less (decreasing the inflow).

Feedback loops either:

A. Stability-seeking. Cause stocks to maintain their level within a range

B. Goal-seeking. Cause rapid growth or decline

One of the central insights of systems theory, as central as the observation that systems largely cause their own behavior, is that systems with similar feedback structures produce similar dynamic behaviors, even if the outward appearance of these systems is completely dissimilar.

This means that you can add systems when you want a desired. Result. If you want insulation from time or short-term deviations, insert a reservoir system. 

Remember: the real world has delay. 

Perception delay

Response delay

Shipping delays

Perception delays

Processing delays

Maturation delays

Delays are often sensitive leverage points for policy, if they can be made shorter or longer

Interesting: Renewable resource stocks are renewable because when their population gets low, they can reproduce more (like fish). However - technology can make the fishing industry profitable at low levels of fish where fisherman would have previously stopped, then the renewable fish may go extinct. 

a straitjacket of constancy can cause fragility to evolve.

Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation.

with redundancy—one kicking in if another one fails.

Resilience is like a plateau. 

A resilient system has a big plateau, a lot of space over which it can wander, with gentle, elastic walls that will bounce it back, if it comes near a dangerous edge.

As a system loses its resilience, its plateau shrinks, until the system is operating on a knife edge,

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.

Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. 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.

There is always a cost. Just be aware of the tradeoff you are making.

Ex. Just-in-time deliveries of products to retailers or parts to manufacturers have reduced inventory instabilities and brought down costs in many industries. The just-in-time model also has made the production system more vulnerable, however, to perturbations in fuel supply, traffic flow, computer breakdown, labor availability, and other possible glitches.

if we weren’t nearly blind to the property of self-organization, we would do better at encouraging the self-organizing capacities of the systems of which we are a part.

Self-organization is also often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability

There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus. 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.

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.

Hierarchies 

• reduce feedback delays
• Allow problems to be treated on a hierarchical level, which saves time

A small organization attracts many members and a bigger budget and one day the members decide, “Hey, we need someone to organize all this.” A cluster of dividing cells differentiates into special functions and generates a branching circulatory system to feed all cells, and a branching nervous system to coordinate them.

Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up.

Events can be spectacular: crashes, assassinations, great victories, terrible tragedies. 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.

We are less likely to be surprised if we can see how events accumulate into dynamic patterns of behavior. The variance of the river is increasing, with higher floodwaters during rains and lower flows during droughts. Discoveries of oil are becoming less frequent. The felling of forests is happening at an ever-increasing rate.

News gives event-level understanding.

Context, history, time graphs give behavior-level understanding.

event caused by — behavior and structure

The world is full of nonlinearities.

If I put 100 pounds of fertilizer on, my yield will go up by 10 bushels; if I put on 200, my yield will not go up at all; if I put on 300, my yield will go down. Why? I’ve damaged my soil with “too much of a good thing.”

The cause is not proportional to the effect. 

In a nonlinear system, twice the push could produce one-sixth the response, or the response squared, or no response at all.

A little tasteful advertising can awaken interest in a product. A lot of blatant advertising can cause disgust for the product.

It’s a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose.

Limiting Factor:

It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of the minimum.” It doesn’t matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what’s short is phosphorus. It does no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.

Insight comes not only from recognizing which factor is limiting, but from seeing that growth itself depletes or enhances limits and therefore changes what is limiting.

Hm: Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

The invisible foot: 

We do our best to further our own nearby interests in a rational way, but we can take into account only what we know.

When we don’t have perfect information, we don’t consider how our actions will affect the system, just ourselves.  

Wow: Because the poor can afford to buy only small quantities (of food, fuel, seed, fertilizer), they pay the highest prices.

Species and companies sometimes escape competitive exclusion by diversifying. This allows them to virtually exit the game and start a new one.

A company can create a new product or service that does not directly compete with existing ones

If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.

They are high leverage points. Power over the rules is real power

Ask: Who writes the rules here?

The second-highest point of leverage is Paradigm - the mindset of the system. It can change in a second. It takes no physical change. It can make a night-and-day difference. 

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.

In the end, it seems that mastery has to do  with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.

Language as a filter through which we perceive the world:

[Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about.

More profound than I can understand right now.

I liked this example:

Imagine a triangle with three equal sides. Add to the middle of each side another equilateral triangle, one-third the size of the first one. Add to each of the new sides another triangle, one-third smaller. And so on. The result is called a Koch snowflake. (See Figure 46.) Its edge has tremendous length—but it can be contained within a circle. This structure is one simple example of fractal geometry—a realm of mathematics and art populated by elaborate shapes formed by relatively simple rules.