CAPSULE | READS: Thinking in Systems

Key takeaways on: Models, System Performance & Highly Functional Systems.

ON MODELS: Everything we think we know of the world is a model.

• Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we create from direct intimate experience.
• Everything is connected to everything else — systems rarely have real boundaries.
• System traps can be escaped by reforming goals, altering feedback loops & adding new feedback loops

ON SYSTEM PERFORMANCE: Keep standards absolute, regardless of performance. | Identify the system’s structure that leads to a problem ➡ Feedback loops that dominate the system will determine behavior ➡ Let standards be enhanced by high performance ➡ Look for leverage points to shift behavior. |

• leverage points = points of power
  > be careful not to push change in the wrong direction
• reinforcing feedback loop = balancing the self-correction
  > forces of growth, explosion, erosion, and/or collapse in the system
• the trap = drift to low performance
  > lulled to lower expectations & efforts
• system trap = escalation
  > comes from reinforcing feedback loop(s) trying to get ahead of another

ON HIGHLY FUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS: Why do systems work so well?

1. Resilience: a measure of an environment’s ability to persist in a variable environment
   > arises from many feedback loops to restore a system
2. Self-organizing: the ability to structure itself, to create new structures, to learn, to complexify & to diversify
   > requires freedom, experimentation & a certain amount of disorder
3. Hierarchy: the arrangement of organized subsystems
   > the world is organized in subsystems within sub-systems

When you understand the power of a system’s self-organization, you begin to understand why biologists worship biodiversity.

Helping the system help itself is easier than overcoming an action.

Restore or enhance the ability to build or support its systems.

Expand the boundary of caring — systems thinking provides practical reasons.

Reinforcing feedback loops are forces of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in system.

➡ the more it works, the more it gains power to work some more, driving system behavior in one direction

> balancing feedback loops is self-correcting
> a reinforcing feedback loop is self-reinforcing

Go for the good of the whole: aim to enhance a total system’s properties whether easily measured or not.

• growth
• stability
• diversity
• resilience
• sustainability

Pay attention to the value that already exists.

Don’t erode the goal of goodness.

Introducing Reads as a capsule in the Learn Segment. Each week for the remainder of the year, we’ll be extracting key takeaways and notes from 26 books read in 26 weeks as a practice to nourish learning. Join us in the (re)wiring!