Book notes: Thinking in systems

These are notes I made while reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows. It is a book on Systems Design, or perhaps better, understanding systems. These systems can be software, drinking water systems, political systems, or the world climate “system”

On resilience

Resilience is not the same thing as being static or constant over time. Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short-term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!

System traps

Sometimes systems fail to work, Meadows refers to these as ‘traps’ and identifies a list of common traps, and how to escape from these. It is good to reference the book in case you encounter such traps.

One of the trap mentioned is success to the successful, which may kill competition, she concludes:

These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.

I highlighted this because it eerily looks like what we’re witnessing these days in politics (Dutch, US, politics).

Another trap is choosing the wrong goals:

If the desired system state is national security, and that is defined as the amount of money spent on the military, the system will produce military spending. It may or may not produce national security. In fact, security may be undermined if the spending drains investment from other parts of the economy, and if the spending goes for exorbitant, unnecessary, or unworkable weapons.

It is a good reminder that the 5% GDP goal from NATO may not be the best way to enforce the sought after safety either

Aside: Ukrainians were laughing at our $400.000 dollar missiles against $2000 plywood drones.

On producing change

Meadows goes on to discuss leverage points, “places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior”, an idea derived from Jay Forrester.

Subsidizing low income housing, for example, was found to be such leverage point. Forrester observed that cities not subsidizing are typically better off, and “even the low income folks in the city”.

(I’m wondering if it is different if it is done at state level, or with more careful mixing of housing types, but that’s an entirely different topic)

One can have leverage points at many levels: numbers (amounts of taxes, subsidies, etc), buffers (increase / decrease stabilisers), fix physical systems, change delays, balancing feedback loops, reinforcing feedback loops, improve information flows, create rules.

But the highest levels are:

• Self-organisation
• Redefine the goals of the system
• Change the paradigm
• Transcending paradigms

On self organising systems:

Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience. Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.

The intervention point here is obvious, but unpopular. Encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity means “losing control.” Let a thousand flowers bloom and anything could happen! Who wants that? Let’s play it safe and push this lever in the wrong direction by wiping out biological, cultural, social, and market diversity!

Aside: I like the sarcasm in her writing :)

About changing paradigms:

people who have managed to intervene in systems at the level of paradigm have hit a leverage point that totally transforms systems.

Meadows continues ends with a general advice to all systems thinkers:

Systems thinkers are by no means the first or only people to ask questions like these. When we started asking them, we found whole disciplines, libraries, histories, asking the same questions, and to some extent offering answers. What was unique about our search was not our answers, or even our questions, but the fact that the tool of systems thinking, born out of engineering and mathematics, implemented in computers, drawn from a mechanistic mind-set and a quest for prediction and control, leads its practitioners, inexorably I believe, to confront the most deeply human mysteries. Systems thinking makes clear even to the most committed technocrat that getting along in this world of complex systems requires more than technocracy.

From this follows a sense of humility:

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat.

Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories.

It mimics the scientific process, modelling a system, testing it against evidence, and “scuttle them if they are no longer supported”.

The book ends with recommendations on how to approach it, and it comes with some moral obligations

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.

And last:

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called “drift to low performance” is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. … Systems thinking can only tell us to do that. It can’t do it. We’re back to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap, but it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

Reflection

The Wikipedia page on Designing In Systems mentions the book as a recommended read for masters in Computer Science. Somehow only the gist reached me, perhaps also because of what she hints at, that similar quests have been made in other disciplines as well, but I am glad to finally have found the opportunity to read the book. With a masters in Human-Technology Interaction the observational approach to machines operating in a context was at the core of my education. But Systems Design is an interesting framework to structure these observations with inflows, outflows, stocks and delays, loops, oscillations (I even appreciate it as a guitarist :)), which is a good addition to the toolbox one uses to reason about more complicated problems, both within IT as outside, or as I sometimes like to do, to reflect on the role of IT (systems) within society :)

Cover photo of a rainbow slinky by Clare Black (CC-BY)