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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
informative
reflective
medium-paced
A valuable method to model and analyse a wide range of subjects, from politics and economics to plumbing and even your relationships and emotions. Had a profound effect on my perspective on many aspects of my life. Highly recommended
I may disagree with some of the real world system examples, but the fundamental ideas behind system structures, feedbacks and traps, appear quite sound.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
This has become my holy grail book. Everyone should read this and gain an understanding of how everything is interconnected and how to work with that, both in organisations and personal life
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.
The first part of this book was very dry and I almost gave up. I really enjoyed the part about systems traps and principles. Although the book is quite simplistic, it’s got me interested in the field. Not the best book ever, but definitely not a waste of time to read! I dare say I learned a thing or two.
Har förändrat min väldsbild. Jag kommer läsa den igen när jag har hunnit smälta innehållet.
When I reread The Fifth Discipline and wrote a book review for it, I found a few references to Donella Meadows and upon further research I found the book Thinking in Systems. The book is odd in that it was published posthumously. The book draft was written in 1993 but was never published. She unexpectedly died in 2001 and in 2008 the book was finally brought to print. I’m glad that it did. As much as Singe’s work made systems thinking popular, Meadows work was much richer and deeper than was possible with The Fifth Discipline.
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Click here to read the full review
This is a great introduction to the subject. It's concise, intuitive and left me wanting to dig deeper.
The basic mental model is that the world is composed of systems and sub-systems. You, as someone trying to understand a particular system, should cultivate the ability to look at a system of interest (e.g. a market economy, a friendship, a cell) varying levels of surrounding context. The most useful context depends on the particular question you want to ask. You may be interested in why Apple's stock has gone down over the last few months. You don't need to consider the affects of sun spots on that subsystem even though both exist within the solar system. If you only look at Apple CEO Tim Cook, then you aren't looking at enough of the system.
Make your mental model of the system explicit using a stock-and-flow diagram. I recently read The Book of Why and this kind of diagram reminded me of causal diagrams from that book. Anything that you care to measure is a stock - it's material or information that accumulates over time. Stocks increase or decrease depending on the net difference between their inflows and outflows. So, the stock of fish in the ocean increases as the new fish flow into the system via reproduction and decreases as fish are caught or killed (i.e. outflow). Increasingly, I am a fan for practices that force you to make your assumptions explicit. Explicit assumptions are easier to interrogate.
Most of the things we care about are embedded in complex systems. Some systems share patterns of behavior based on how they are structured. Their structure creates their behavior. So, if you can modify the structure, you modify the behavior. If you are displeased with behavior of an un- or de-regulated market economy, then you have a suite of options for intervening in the system (e.g. limit size or share, reduce the advantages of winners, increase the advantages of new entrants, etc).
Meadows goes on to catalog components and properties of systems, where to intervene in the system and how to cultivate systems thinking. She lists the common traps of systems. These are worth memorizing because you will see them all the time. Read the book for general solutions to each kind of trap with the caveat that specific solutions depend on the specific system context.
* policy resistance: when things never seem to change
* tragedy of the commons: when people drain limited water supplies, over-fish oceans, over-log forests
* drift to low performance: when things keep getting worse
* escalation: when you get in a trade war, arms race, wealth race, escalating loudness, escalating violence
* success to the successful: when monopolies happen, when Bayern Munich wins the Bundesliga
* shifting the burden to the intervenor: when people get addicted to drugs, industries get addicted to government subsidies, families increasingly depend on nursing homes or retirement communities
* rule-beating: when people cheat
* seeking the wrong goal: when the goal people care about and the goal the system is designed for are different; when GNP or GDP is more important than capital stocks
Basically, I felt like a learned a lot and that more people should read this. It works as a gentle introduction to a complex way of thinking.
The basic mental model is that the world is composed of systems and sub-systems. You, as someone trying to understand a particular system, should cultivate the ability to look at a system of interest (e.g. a market economy, a friendship, a cell) varying levels of surrounding context. The most useful context depends on the particular question you want to ask. You may be interested in why Apple's stock has gone down over the last few months. You don't need to consider the affects of sun spots on that subsystem even though both exist within the solar system. If you only look at Apple CEO Tim Cook, then you aren't looking at enough of the system.
Make your mental model of the system explicit using a stock-and-flow diagram. I recently read The Book of Why and this kind of diagram reminded me of causal diagrams from that book. Anything that you care to measure is a stock - it's material or information that accumulates over time. Stocks increase or decrease depending on the net difference between their inflows and outflows. So, the stock of fish in the ocean increases as the new fish flow into the system via reproduction and decreases as fish are caught or killed (i.e. outflow). Increasingly, I am a fan for practices that force you to make your assumptions explicit. Explicit assumptions are easier to interrogate.
Most of the things we care about are embedded in complex systems. Some systems share patterns of behavior based on how they are structured. Their structure creates their behavior. So, if you can modify the structure, you modify the behavior. If you are displeased with behavior of an un- or de-regulated market economy, then you have a suite of options for intervening in the system (e.g. limit size or share, reduce the advantages of winners, increase the advantages of new entrants, etc).
Meadows goes on to catalog components and properties of systems, where to intervene in the system and how to cultivate systems thinking. She lists the common traps of systems. These are worth memorizing because you will see them all the time. Read the book for general solutions to each kind of trap with the caveat that specific solutions depend on the specific system context.
* policy resistance: when things never seem to change
* tragedy of the commons: when people drain limited water supplies, over-fish oceans, over-log forests
* drift to low performance: when things keep getting worse
* escalation: when you get in a trade war, arms race, wealth race, escalating loudness, escalating violence
* success to the successful: when monopolies happen, when Bayern Munich wins the Bundesliga
* shifting the burden to the intervenor: when people get addicted to drugs, industries get addicted to government subsidies, families increasingly depend on nursing homes or retirement communities
* rule-beating: when people cheat
* seeking the wrong goal: when the goal people care about and the goal the system is designed for are different; when GNP or GDP is more important than capital stocks
Basically, I felt like a learned a lot and that more people should read this. It works as a gentle introduction to a complex way of thinking.
Fantastic clear and concise introduction to systems thinking. Focuses on examples from sustainability but generally useful.