Thinking In Systems

When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility-the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure - is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

INTRODUCTION

KEY TAKEAWAYS

"Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other.” - Russell Ackoff

• systems thinking will help us manage, adapt, and see the wide range of choices we have before us. It is a way of thinking that gives us the freedom to identify root causes of problems and see new opportunities."
• So, what is a system? A system is a set of things - people, cells, molecules, or whatever -interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.
• Systems thinkers call these common structures that produce characteristic behaviors ‘archetypes.’
• The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.” - Poul Anderson

• A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
• The elements of a system are often the easiest parts to notice, because many of them are visible, tangible things.
• It's easier to learn about a system's elements than about its interconnections.
• If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system's function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.
• An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.
• Systems can be nested within systems. Therefore, there can be purposes within purposes.
• The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows. Therefore, we sometimes miss seeing that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate.
• Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows. That means system thinkers see the world as a collection of "feedback processes”.
• Remember - all system diagrams are simplifications of the real world. We each choose how much complexity to look at.
• In other words, your mental model of the system needs to include all the important flows, or you will be surprised by the system's behavior.
• In the process of creating new structures and increasing complexity, one thing that a self-organizing system often generates is hierarchy.
• When a subsystem's goals dominate at the expense of the total system's goals, the resulting behavior is called suboptimization.
• The interactions between what I think I know about dynamic systems and my experience of the real world never fails to be humbling. They keep reminding me of three truths:
• 1. Everything we think we know about the world is a model.
• 2. Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world.
• 3. However, and conversely, our models fall far short of representing the world fully. That is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised.
• You can't navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don't respect their properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy.
• Systems thinking goes back and forth constantly between structure (diagrams of stocks, flows, and feedback) and behavior (time graphs). Systems thinkers strive to understand the connections between.
• There are only boundaries of word, thought, perception, and social agreement artificial, mental-model boundaries. The greatest complexities arise exactly at boundaries."
• The lesson of boundaries is hard even for systems thinkers to get. There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; and boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we've artificially created them. When you draw boundaries too narrowly, the system surprises you.
• Ideally, we would have the mental flexibility to find the appropriate boundary for thinking about each new problem. We are rarely that flexible. We get attached to the boundaries our minds happen to be accustomed to.
• Drift to low performance is gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance.
• Species and companies sometimes escape competitive exclusion by diversifying. A species can learn or evolve to exploit new resources. A company can create a new product or service that does not directly compete with existing ones.
• But Forrester goes on to point out that although people deeply involved in a system often know intuitively where to find leverage points, more often than not they push the change in the wrong direction.
• Counterintuitive - that's Forrester's word to describe complex systems. Leverage points frequently are not intuitive. Or if they are, we too often use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.
• The most stunning thing living systems and some social systems can do is change themselves utterly by creating whole new structures and behaviors. In biological systems that power is called evolution. In systems lingo it's called self-organization.
• The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience. A system that can evolve can survive almost any change, by changing itself.
• Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems. […] people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.
• So how do you change paradigms? You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded. Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole.
• Get the Beat of the System Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. Learn it’s history. Ask people who've been around a long time to tell you what has happened. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories.
• Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility-the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure-is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.
• Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
• Don't maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Don't, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability-whether they are easily measured or not.
• The thing to do, when you don't know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment - or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. Pretending you're in control even when you aren't is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes.

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