Darcy Hithcock from AXIS highlights Donella Meadows book “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” in her latest newsletter.

A lot of the sustainability solutions are around understanding “systems” and the “places to intervene in a system” to find a solution or a better equilibrium.

I understand the benefits and now I need to dig deeper, learn the vocabulary and implement systems thinking in my work and life.

I wish I could have met Donella Meadows before she died unexpectedly in 2001. She’s a brilliant mind but also an excellent teacher. The book, finished and published posthumously, is filled with easy-to-understand metaphors and examples (Slinkys and hot cups of coffee.), making a complex subject approachable. She also emphasizes that systems thinking isn’t better than reductionist thinking; it’s complimentary. As our world tries to pull ourselves out of an unsustainable and crashed economy, these concepts are well worth revisiting.

She reveals common human mistakes when dealing with systems:
–we focus on stocks (fish in sea, forests) more than flows (rates of decline);
–we focus more in inflows (producing more stuff to grow the economy) rather than outflows (slowing the rate at which things need to be replaced);
–we focus more on events than patterns;
–because of delays in the system, we often use interventions that make the problem worse (e.g., inventory imbalances).

“You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take you eyes of short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect the properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy.”

Of particular use is her listing of common system traps and what to do about them:

* policy resistance
* tragedy of the commons.
* Drift to low performance
* Escalation
* Success to the successful.
* Shifting the burden to intervenor
* Rule beating
* Seeking the wrong goal

In Part Three, Meadows explains her places to intervene in a system. This is the part most people are familiar with but in this lexicon, there are 12 points (from least effective to highest impact):

* Numbers
* Buffers
* Stock and Flow Structures
* Delays
* Balancing feedback loops
* Reinforcing feedback loops
* Information flows
* Rules
* Self-organization
* Goals
* Paradigms
* Transcending paradigms
*

She advises us to

* first get the ‘beat’ of a system before trying to change it,
* expose your mental models,
* honor, respect and distribute information
* Use language with care, infused with systems concepts
* Pay attention to what is important, not just quantifiable
* Make feedback policies for feedback systems
* Go for the good of the whole
* Listen to the wisdom in the system
* Locate responsibility in the system
* Stay humble
* Celebrate complexity.

In the end, she discovers that “ We can’t control systems of figure them out. But we can dance with them!”