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4.18 AVERAGE
4.18 AVERAGE
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
reflective
medium-paced
I haven't fully processed this book and I think I'll be wrestling with it for at least the rest of the year.
The author, who I believe wrote this manuscript which was finished and released a decade later, basically highlights the importance of thinking about complex issues in terms of systems. These aren't just grand words ... there is a clear terminology and breakdown of what a system means, what its constituent parts are (flows, stocks, feedback loops, goals, etc...) and how we as outside or involved observers can reason about them and influence them in deliberate ways.
The book breaks down systems into different taxonomies, and also describes patterns of how changes map to results. Insightfully, the author also describes the ways systems as described are not _intuitive_ to most people and how commonsense and intuitive ways of engaging with them often backfire since there is a real discipline to engaging with them.
The book has an ecological (and anti-capitalist) bent to its examples, but is designed to be applied to any subject or field where systems are involved. I found that reading this in a book club, people with pre-ideated opinions on the ecological or political tone of the book sometimes got caught on that, but if one can put those away (if one is an economist they might feel justifiably on the derfensive) the underlying discussion still seems useful as a primer which does not claim to cover the field of systems thinking in totality.
As I was reading this book some examples of systems in my own work and life very easily popped into my head, and while the book did attempt to give me the ability to identify more, it did not pretend that this would be a somewhat alien mechanic I would struggle to adopt into my toolkit, and this has proven to be true.
My emotional response to this book is one of excitement because I have very much struggled to engage with people while lacking the terminology and understanding of a thing that this book finally puts in my grasp, but also shows me places where I can remove some of my own cognitive dissonances because I might be holding onto things that are only making my own life difficult (or that, if I want to hold onto, I will need to tackle in a different way.)
I feel this book is essential to anyone who enjoys or desires to influence change over other people. It doesn't pretend to make this easy for you, but what I think it does is give you a foundation that makes this possible in a way that doesn't require using force of will and sleight of rhetoric to get one's desires achieved, and it also gives you the opportunity to see whether the things you want will achieve achieve the benefits you imagine and predict some of the drawbacks (which often other people will intuit but also struggle to communicate back to you.)
The author, who I believe wrote this manuscript which was finished and released a decade later, basically highlights the importance of thinking about complex issues in terms of systems. These aren't just grand words ... there is a clear terminology and breakdown of what a system means, what its constituent parts are (flows, stocks, feedback loops, goals, etc...) and how we as outside or involved observers can reason about them and influence them in deliberate ways.
The book breaks down systems into different taxonomies, and also describes patterns of how changes map to results. Insightfully, the author also describes the ways systems as described are not _intuitive_ to most people and how commonsense and intuitive ways of engaging with them often backfire since there is a real discipline to engaging with them.
The book has an ecological (and anti-capitalist) bent to its examples, but is designed to be applied to any subject or field where systems are involved. I found that reading this in a book club, people with pre-ideated opinions on the ecological or political tone of the book sometimes got caught on that, but if one can put those away (if one is an economist they might feel justifiably on the derfensive) the underlying discussion still seems useful as a primer which does not claim to cover the field of systems thinking in totality.
As I was reading this book some examples of systems in my own work and life very easily popped into my head, and while the book did attempt to give me the ability to identify more, it did not pretend that this would be a somewhat alien mechanic I would struggle to adopt into my toolkit, and this has proven to be true.
My emotional response to this book is one of excitement because I have very much struggled to engage with people while lacking the terminology and understanding of a thing that this book finally puts in my grasp, but also shows me places where I can remove some of my own cognitive dissonances because I might be holding onto things that are only making my own life difficult (or that, if I want to hold onto, I will need to tackle in a different way.)
I feel this book is essential to anyone who enjoys or desires to influence change over other people. It doesn't pretend to make this easy for you, but what I think it does is give you a foundation that makes this possible in a way that doesn't require using force of will and sleight of rhetoric to get one's desires achieved, and it also gives you the opportunity to see whether the things you want will achieve achieve the benefits you imagine and predict some of the drawbacks (which often other people will intuit but also struggle to communicate back to you.)
this was boring and I ended up dropping the class so I'm not gonna finish it.