4.18 AVERAGE

informative slow-paced

Read this for “optional” book club at work. It was boring lol. Also depressing bc it was written in like the 90s and some of the politics stuff and examples have just gotten so so worse now so that was a tough read.
informative fast-paced

Please follow the link for my review of Thinking in Systems.
https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2025/03/book-review-thinking-in-systems-primer.html

This all feels very intuitive, which is the point I suppose. I just don't feel like it adds much beyond the thesis statement. It provides helpful language around systems but doesn't reveal new or interesting ways of thinking like I hoped.

Oh, and the author uses the story of blind men feeling different parts on an elephant and coming to different conclusions as an analogy for systems 🤦‍♂️
challenging hopeful informative medium-paced

Trite and suffocated by an excess of examples. This would be a better book if it was a third as long.
informative slow-paced

I didn’t use the included curriculum and read this as an audio book so I probably didn’t maximize its use. But it was informative. My biggest takeaways is how important and impactful vision and understanding is. The sections talking about people having limited vision to the greater systems they play into stood out to me as I process change and community growth.
informative inspiring medium-paced

I'm planning to re-read this almost immediately!

THE critical book for navigating the anthropocene. Simple, instructive, intuitive. A handbook for understanding and explaining working with systems at any scale and affecting change and making measurable impact.

Read this to give yourself a framework and apolitical language to describe the structural changes that you can easily intuit but struggle to convince leaders to change.

Durante meu tempo na universidade tive a oportunidade de ler Teoria Geral dos Sistemas do Bertalanffy e outros outores da Teoria dos Sistemas e Cibernética. O diferencial de Thinking in Systems da Donella Meadows é apresentar uma visão introdutória do conhecimento sobre o pensamento sistêmico e também facilitar a compreensão sobre o tema.

Estudar esses temas ligados aos sistemas é fascinante. Sempre me sinto mais ignorante, pois é impossível ler sobre este tema e continuar achando que temos algum controle sobre o que acontece em nossas vidas, organizações ou relacionamentos. O máximo que conseguimos fazer, como a próxima Donella nos fala, é dançar com eles. É muito difícil mudar um sistema, mas é fácil desenhar um novo, é fácil mudar como a informação se propaga.

Recomendo a leitura para todos que estão em busca de mais dúvidas e menos respostas.