Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of

Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

there are questions you need to ask that will help you decide how good a representation of reality is the underlying model. Are the driving factors likely to unfold this way? (What are birth rate and death rate likely to do?) If they did, would the system react this way? (Do birth and death rates really cause the population stock to behave as we th

In the process of creating new structures and increasing complexity, one thing that a self-organizing system often generates is hierarchy.

Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems. I’ll get back to this point later when we come to hierarchies.

If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.

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

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It ha

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.