Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller

What a joy it was to read this book! It was my first contact with systems thinking, and I got hooked thanks to the author!

The media could not be loaded. I love this book it stands out because of its ability to take complex ideas and make them understandable. Meadows walks you through the basics of systems thinking—feedback loops, delays, stocks and flows—with real-world examples.

Useful overview of system structure and behavior. List of recommendations of how to interact with systems or what signals to pay attention to. Near the end veering a bit into the mystical or metaphysical when talking about hard-to-measure qualities and moral or ethical values.

There are a few books that encapsulate a way of thinking so simply, so clearly and so compellingly that I find myself giving little kisses of delight to the cover. I read this on a Kindle, so this resulted in quite a lot of smudging.I am not a student of systems or someone who ever spent much time thinking about systems at all, although, like practically everybody, my life and work are all about either creating, maintaining, supporting, or surviving various systems. I heard about this book from a Tweet referring to its twenty-fifth anniversary and linking to an article singing its praises, which it does better than I can. For me, it has been a truly revelatory experience, a platonic slave-in-the-cave moment, which I believe will divide my cognitive experience into pre and post its reading. As Meadows warns at its outset, studying systems leads one to see systems everywhere, which, of course, is because they were there all along. But being able to see and interpret them allows us to better participate and avoid traps that commonly lead to system failure. Sadly, it also allows us to understand why some decisions taken by executives, politicians, and others that manage systems in which we have little or no control are doomed to failure and to undermine their own goals. This awareness will help readers become better citizens/coworkers and critics of leadership. But it can also help us avoid issues that threaten our own, smaller systems, our relationships, families, homes, work, and health.This book draws heavily on examples from the time in which it was written, which artificially sets the book in a particular historical moment. Meadows simply had so many examples to chose from, that she took quotes from contemporaneous newspaper articles. But the examples might as well be chosen from today’s stories or those from hundreds of years ago. They are just examples. This book is timeless. These quotes from the early nineties have the added benefit of proving her point, as in most cases history has borne out the predictions that stem from the flaws and features that Meadows points out.Note that there were some oddities in the Kindle version. A few words seem to have disappeared in various places in the transposition. I bought a hard copy of the book and was able to fill the gaps (just a few words here and there, nothing that would keep me from recommending the Kindle edition). I hope the editors will correct this.The end of the book contains a very useful appendix that I am tempted to tear out and put up on the wall, detailing fundamentals of systems thinking.I could not recommend this highly enough.

Donella opened my eyes to a different way of thinking and to the importance of systems thinking. She challenged the widely accepted use of GNP as a measure of a country’s growth, showing how it doesn’t reflect true progress. She revealed the long-term harm this kind of thinking can bring to a nation. Her insights helped me think differently and see many things differently.

Full of insights on biological and human systems with ideas on how to effectively influence them as well as the dangers involved. One chapter focuses is called Leverage Points - Places to Intervene In a System which describes, in an order from least effective to most effective, ways to influence a system.Reading this made me realize we are witnessing, in real time, her 2nd most important leverage point, Paradigms. The paradigm of what the United States is and stands for is being reshaped in the specific way she describes: "You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new [paradigm]. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power".Systems do not remain static, for better or worse.

Thinking in systems is analogous to ‘zooming out’ and looking at something from a broader perspective. Whether you are examining the functions of a social body, a corporate body, a governmental body, or a human body, the processes are generally the same. Each system has an intended goal (strengthening community bonds, monetary growth, keeping the body alive) and it has different processes for how it achieves this goal.All systems have a ‘stock’ which is the foundation of what the system uses to achieve its goal. Stocks are things like “the water in a bathtub, a population, the books in a bookstore, the wood in a tree, the money in a bank, your own self-confidence,” which are subject to the flows of the system. “Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures.” Stock is what you have at any one moment in time and the flow is how it changes.Let’s take the human body as an example. The body’s stock is comprised of its organs, bones, muscles, tissues, and all the things on the inside that keep it running. The body’s flow is the intake of food and water, which the system translates into energy, and the output of this energy as human waste. The goal of this system is to keep the body alive.When systems get tricky is when the reported goal of a system is different from the results it tangibly achieves. For example, what is the ostensible goal of a business? Most business owners would tell you their goal is to deliver customer satisfaction in the form of whatever it is they make and sell, whether it be haircuts or hot meals. This is true for local businesses, but larger businesses are more honest when they admit their company goal is to make a profit. In reality, the true goal of most businesses in a capitalistic system is “to grow, to increase market share, [and] to bring the world (customers, suppliers, regulators) more and more under the control of the corporation.” Ask yourself this: Does McDonald’s pride itself more on its delicious hamburgers or its worldwide recognition?A system that I have been considering lately is our doctoral system here in the United States. Many doctors work 70-80 hour weeks with overnight hours which means a rotating sleep schedule and off-beat eating habits. The fastest you can reasonably become a doctor is after passing 4 years of undergraduate school, 4 years of medical school, and then completing a 5 year residency. If you graduate high school at age 18, you are finishing your residency at age 31 (probably with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans). These are tough conditions and high standards. Our society’s system for training and managing doctors has developed alongside the growth of society for hundreds of years, which means that all of these mechanisms were developed for good purposes. For one thing, there is simply so much more that we know about medicine and the human body that must be learned. It still remains that a major symptom of this system is overtired doctors and we need to adjust the flow and help them out. Alternatively, consider the system surrounding the careers of professors. Tenure was implemented in order to gives teachers academic freedom, which is a good thing. One of its symptoms, however, is that the process of achieving tenure has become ultra competitive.What happens when a country’s goals are poorly defined? Here in the United States, and in many western countries, we measure our economic goals by our level of GNP (gross national product), which is the value of the final goods and services produced by the economy. This number, however, says nothing about our health, happiness, beauty, strength, intelligence or integrity. Our GNP rises if there are more car accidents and medical bills. Defining business and economics in this way has cost humanity in many major ways including environmental degradation, monopolization of markets by huge corporations, and the suction of wealth from the lower classes to the higher.All of this analysis leads us to the inevitable question: how do we change a system? The first thing to define is which system we wish to investigate and alter. This is important because 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—the questions we want to ask.” If your house is too cold, then you must examine the insulation and the thermostat. If your body is sick, you must examine the fuel you are putting into it and the people you allow around it. If your country is broken, that too must be examined. Is it the social system, the environmental system, or the governmental system? Is it the financial system, the educational system, or the welfare system? The reality, of course, is that problems lie within each of these systems independently and also as a whole. There are no easy answers here, the difficultly lying in the fact that the farther one zooms out, the more overlapped all of these systems become. To change one requires the agreement and movement of masses of people in one unified direction. But what if fixing one environmental problem causes a cultural one? Or vice versa? The complexities are never-ending.If you zoom all the way out, you can see that all of us are connected across time and space. “Actions taken now [will] have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago.” Many of the systems we inhabit today are like rivers that we were thrown mercilessly into. They were already running, predetermined by forces and people who came long before us, and while it is our job to stay afloat while we are on the water, and to improve upon them as best we can, they will continue to run long after we are gone.