Thinking in Systems, Ch. 7: Living with Systems

I've been doing a series on thinking in systems and this video is the last chapter of that book it's basically Donna Meadows tips on how to deal with systems from her own experience so you kind of have to feel out systems based on intuition and so this is her just trying to articulate what is her intuition about the right way to work with systems and she she emphasizes at the beginning of the chapter that systems thinkers should not be technocracy people where they think that once they have all of the parts in place and all

the rules in place the system will behave as expected systems always have unexpected ways of Behaving that's just the way to think about it and therefore as you're designing the system you need to be constantly paying attention constantly responding back and forth with the system she says dancing with the system and this is particularly true with systems that involve humans you because how predictable is any human being you know systems are basically working with groups with where human needs human desires human frailties human strengths and weaknesses all come into play and therefore you have to

constantly feel out how does this particular group of people respond within the system where do they resist where do they go above and beyond Etc so so here are her tips first get the beat of the system watch the system observe it try to figure out what are its rhythms what are its patterns if you come into the system without actually observing how it's behaving you're going to have some mental model that doesn't fully capture the most important heartbeats of the system and she emphasizes that you should not just listen to other people's interpretations and

other people's models of the system you actually need to observe the system yourself another sub-tip within this chapter is that you should not Define the problem with the system as lack of your solution for example the problem is we need to ban abortion or the problem is we need to hire more workers well no hiring more workers is not the problem or lack of workers the problem is something else the hiring more workers is your assumed solution her next tip is to expose your mental models to the light of the day and of course there's

a number of reasons for this one of them is just to get feedback from other people who think differently who have insights that you would never come up with but another is just when you have to write down your mental model and spell it out it gets around sometimes the vagueness we may have in our models when it's just in our head and we haven't written it on paper our mental models may have inconsistencies that we will not notice until we write it down and look at it clearly on the page so this can involve

writing about it building a model of it which could be a mathematical model or a diagram it could be a list of assumptions there's all different ways to sort of get your mental model on paper honor respect and distribute information of course the more information you have about a system the better you're going to be able to fix it and understand it and all of that her next tip is to use language with care this is to avoid language pollution let let the meaning of your words be precise and clear let your words be concrete

meaningful and truthful and watch out for words that depreciate because sometimes the meaning of a word can depreciate if people use it for too long in a vague way and other times the meaning of words can be hijacked by people who perhaps don't want you to see a certain truth about the system or have some other incentive here's a great quote from this section a society that talks incessantly about productivity but hardly understands much less uses the word resilience is going to become productive but not resilient her next tip is to pay attention to what

is important not just what is measurable because the most important things out there are probably not very measurable Justice truth democracy love security Freedom none of those is really perfectly quantifiable and yet those are the things that we want both into our systems her next tip is to make feedback policies for feedback systems and by this one she meant that you should design learning into the systems so that managers will try something and there's some there's some feedback policy that says oh revisit and learn from what you just did update the rules basically build in

feedback loops that will help the system to self-organize and learn seven is to go for the good of the whole and don't ignore any one part of your system listen to the wisdom of the system this is basically avoid coming in with your own ideas of how to fix the system without understanding um the great things that are sort of coming out of the system from self-organization and I loved her example here this is her example was basically if you have a town it perhaps in a developing country where they have a really vibrant and

thriving local market where there's tons of Entrepreneurship and people you know working within the market sometimes you can have someone from a Western Country come in and say we need to create jobs we need to bring in outside investment we need to promote entrepreneurship and by that they have in their head a classic Factory like in their country so they come in and try to develop that without actually tapping into the wonderful entrepreneurship and creativity that exists in that local market her next tip is to locate responsibility and this is basically where she says align

people's incentives make sure people in the system have skin in the game her next tip is to stay humble and to learn from trial and error try something knowing that it may not work the way it works in your head see how it works afterwards be humble enough to admit you were wrong or you something happened that you didn't expect I would actually call this one trial and error her next two are to celebrate complexity obviously um to expand time Horizons don't just look at the short run look at the long run and I'm getting

tired of listing these and a lot of these are self-explanatory so I think I'm going to stop there but that's just that's how the book ends it's an amazing book I've really enjoyed doing this series