Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller

But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing.

A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.

It’s easier to learn about a system’s elements than about its interconnections.

Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all.

Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.

Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or to runaway collapses over time. They are found whenever a stock has the capacity to reinforce or reproduce itself.

Social systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.

I don’t think the systems way of seeing is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary, and therefore revealing.

At any given time, the input that is most important to a system is the one that is most limiting.

A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.