Name: Angeline Bien's review of Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
Item: Thinking in Systems
Rating: 5
Author: Angeline Bien

Donella H. Meadows

Diana Wright

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Meadows' newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

A Primer

Thinking in Systems

Ritik Sahni

One of the best books I’ve read this far, it felt like knots in my mind began getting cleared up. It will take probably the rest of my life to implement what I have learned from this because it’s that wide-ranging of a topic. I suspect I will look back on this point as life before and after systems thinking. Really good.

Angeline Bien

Timeo Williams

A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves
something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see
that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.(28)
- An example of a typical system: A football team is a system with elements such as players, coach, field, and ball. Its interconnections are the rules of the game, the coach’s strategy, the players’ communications, and the laws of physics that govern the motions of ball and players. The purpose of the team is to win games, or have fun, or get exercise, or make millions of dollars, or all of the above.(28)

- Much of systems thinking is not simply looking at the isolate parts of a system, but rather the interconnection of the various parts. 

The parts of a system:

1. Stock

A stock is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the elements of the
system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time. A system
stock is just what it sounds like: a store, a quantity, an accumulation of
material or information that has built up over time."(34)

Stocks - can act as delays/buffers, due to the fact that it takes time for the flows to truly change the amount of stock. 

2. Flows

Changes to the stock over time, result from flows. Flows come in both inflows and outflows. 

3. Dynamics
- If you understand the dynamics of stocks and flows, you'll understand a good deal about the behavior of complex systems. 

4. Dynamic Equilibrium
- When the stock has remained at a constant level, it is due to the inflows = outflows. 

5. Feedback Loops
"When a stock grows by leaps and bounds or declines swiftly or is held
within a certain range no matter what else is going on around it, it is likely
that there is a control mechanism at work."(42)

- There is both a balancing feedback loop and a reinforcing feedback loop.

Jason Lo

Natalie

An accessible and humanistic introduction to applied systems theory. You may take longer to read this deceptively short book than you expect, as you reconsider your understanding of the systems you encounter in your life. Though it is heavy on real-world examples of systems but light on solutions to fixing broken ones, the book’s optimism of human “self-correction” (to use a systems theory term explained in the book) is infectious and inspiring. This should be required reading for anyone seeking to grasp the complexity of 21st century life.

matej yangwao

** spoiler alert **
           Great take how to tweak and achieve working system, survive new terrain, not to implode from inside, keep delivering results.

>A system is whatever contains parts that work in sync to achieve a main goal, be it a church or a football team.

>This calls for tweaking or adjusting, and naturally, a system can be adjusted to make room for the changes it experiences. To adjust a system, you change its buffers, design, and delays.

>To ensure the smooth running of a system and for it to achieve its purpose, we must fix the internal mechanism by working on the intangible elements.

Gavin

An attempt to make holism rigorous; given holism's deep intuitive appeal for people, the attempt is worthy. But I was hostile to this at first – mostly because her field helped breed a generation of pseuds who use ‘reductionism’ as an insult (rather than as a straightforward fact, or a useful way of thinking, instances of which denote the highest achievements of the species). Let's get clear:

 “REDUCTIONISM” (to the pseud): The claim that complicated or immeasurable things do not exist.
 “SYSTEMS THEORY” (to the pseud): The only way of understanding things: as a whole. Everything else omits and so isn't full.
 
 REDUCTIONISM (ontology): The claim that complicated things are made of simpler things. Only the simplest of them are physically real; the rest are mental models of their interactions.*
 REDUCTIONISM (methodology): The attempt to isolate causes and treat phenomena in terms of their most basic units (whether quark, string, person, transaction).
 SYSTEMS THEORY: When things get together, they exhibit features the individual things don’t.


So stated, there is no conflict between good old reduction and shiny systems thinking. But Meadows distils the juicy bits into <200pp here, and freely admits that systems theory has an intractable indeterminacy built into it, and says this, too:
 Ever since the Industrial Revolution, 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 technical fix that will make a problem go away.

 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. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems… Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.

 That is because they are intrinsically systems problems – undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.


Can it resolve empirical questions the way physics does, though? In saying, probably rightly, that a flow could go either way, depending on the state of the rest of the system and neighbouring systems, you lose or sideline crucial power to find out a single cause's influence, and thereby know more or less exactly what to do to the system. In other places, knowledge comes from isolating causes. A reductionist can agree with all the clever diagrams in this, happily concede that they illustrate the gnarly problems of collective action and feedback and other ecosystems very clearly - and not give up their peerlessly successful method / ontological stance at all. 



* Also
PHYSICALISM: Everything is made of physical things. (However, the physical may be stranger than you think.)

Bouke van der Bijl

Good book that reads very quickly, it gives you mental ‘tools’ to analyzes systems, where a system is defined by relationships between different things. It encourages you to look at the world through the lens of feedback loops which allows you to answer questions about why things are the way they are. 


Also we are so fuuuucked when it comes to climate change

This book is life changing. Author does an amazing job at explaining the principles to reason over systems in the world around. Learn about the traps that systems fall into and ways to get out.

Ethan Hussong

Best book that I've seen on systems and how to view, analyze, and build them. Brilliant content.

Anmol

Gives a good foundation as to how to think problems in terms of systems.

Jon Dubielzyk

Good book about systems that starts of quite technical but gets delightfully practical by the end. It sometimes uses overly complex language which made the book a bit of a struggle to get through.

Ivan Zarea

I have a feeling I’m going to be using this book a lot. And that’s a good feeling — this book is not only an excellent introduction into systems thinking, it also shows examples of interconnectedness, feedback loops and invisible stocks in places that you don’t expect.

But there’s more — and practical and too many great things to list. From explaining why economic degrowth matters (and that’s 1992!) to showing how can you deal with an escalation based on principles to how a thermostat works — the book has a lot to offer for the size. I feel like I grasped so little of it, for now. I only wish this was bigger, more diluted, a non-fiction book that you can read on the bus and swim a bit with the ideas. But that’s the point, I guess. You have to do the mental work.

I came into this short book expecting that I’d read it in a week and get tips on how to model things. It took me months with quite a bit of homework (how about I try to model our hiring process? relationships?) and here I am, with the final chapter challenging the me to evaluate my moral stance in terms of things that can’t be quantified. I didn’t ask to be uncomfortable!

But I’m so grateful I was.

Dennis Bor

It accomplishes that rare feat of actually making you look at the world differently, while enhancing your vocabulary to put that new view into words. Highly recommended.

Ivaylo Durmonski

This is not a book about math or computer programming. It’s a book about how the world is structured to work and how we can better respond to the events that are bound to happen.

The main thesis in Thinking in Systems: A Primer is that everything around us is in direct relationship with other things – a system. The work you do. The country you live in. The relationships you have with your loved ones. Everything is working together as parts of an interconnecting network.

In short, this is how it works: There are inflows and outflows. The work you do, is your inflow. The outflow, is the salary you get. If the amount you get paid is not sufficient, changing your inflow – how hard you work – will hardly lead to more cash. You need to change the system – switch careers or sell your own services, for example. Similarly, the way you treat your kids – your system in this case – will lead to a certain way your kids behave.

Donella Meadow’s teachings will reveal a hidden world. A dynamic world where everything has consequences. You’ll start to see connections between different concepts and finally, start making positive changes in the way you act to move your world in a better direction.

Key takeaway:

Change the way you think. Not what you produce if you want to create something better. As stated in the book, “If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.” You can shut down your business if it’s not working. But if you think the same thoughts, you will simply produce another factory doing the same old useless things.

Read full summary:
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Lance Willett

I love the format of the book, including the clear summaries at the end and the interludes with illustrative stories.

“There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.” Meaning that if we don’t look at the underlying rationality, the pattern will repeat itself.

"System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time."

Pretty obvious stuff, and yet I loved having a clear reference. The appendix at the end is reason enough to own this book.

"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."

Vocabulary note: function generally refers to a nonhuman system; and purpose for a human one.

Donella Meadows

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet— Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Andrew Canion

A book that encourages contemplation of the bigger picture. While it doesn’t have “actions arising”, my takeaway at a functional level was the compatibility that systems thinking has with lean production theory.

Lucas Coelho

Great introduction and overview

This was a good read. This book got me hooked on looking for system archetypes everywhere and making me analyze systems for what they really are: complex interconnected organisms that are visible to us mostly throughout our biased and limited mental models. They are necessary and important nonetheless. 

Now I want to dive deeper.

Victor Gomez Estevez

Genial para empezar en el mundo de los sitemas. Conciso, claro, con buenos ejemplos y resumen de lo más importante.

Ritik Sahni &
Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

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