12.03.2008

Donella H. Meadows

Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing, December 3, 2008.

There is an integrity or wholeness about a system and an active set of mechanisms to maintain that integrity. Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seeks goals, mend injuries, and attend to their own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of nonliving things. Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing over at least some range of disruptions. They are resilient, and many of them are evolutionary. Out of one system other completely new, never-before-imagined systems can arise. [12]

A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements - as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact. [16]

The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior. Interconnections are also critically important. Changing relationship usually changes system behavior. The elements, the parts of the system we are most likely to notice, are often (not always) least important in defining the unique characteristics of the system - unless changing an element also results in changing relationships or purpose. [17]

System thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.
That means system thinkers see the world as a collection of 'feedback processes.' [25]

The flows into or out of the stock are adjusted because of changes in the size of the stock itself. Whoever or whatever is monitoring the stock's level begins a corrective processes, adjusting rates of inflow or outflow (or both) and so changing the stock's level. The stock level feeds back through a chain of signals and actions to control itself. [26]

The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior; it can't deliver the information, and so can't have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback. A person in the system who makes a decision based on the feedback can't change the behavior of the system that drove the current feedback; the decision he or she makes will affect only future behavior. [39]

When one loop dominates another, it has a stronger impact on behavior. Because systems often have several competing feedback loops operating simultaneously, those loops that dominate the system will determine the behavior. [44]

Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. [80]

Hierarchical systems are partially decomposable. They can be taken apart and the subsystems with their especially dense information links can function, at least partially, as systems in their own right. When hierarchies break down, they usually split along their subsystem boundaries. [83]

To be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system - there must be enough central control to achieve coordinated toward the large-system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing. [85]

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers. [85]

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. [87]

Structure determines what behaviors are latent in the system. A goal-seeking balancing feedback loop approaches or holds a dynamic equilibrium. A reinforcing feedback loop generates exponential growth. The two of them linked together are capable of growth, decay, or equilibrium. If they also contain delays, they may produce oscillations. If they work in periodic, rapid bursts, they may produce even more surprising behaviors. [89]

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. [97]

Growth itself depletes or enhances limits and therefore changes what is limiting. The interplay between a growing plant and the soil, a growing company and its market, a growing economy and its resources base, is dynamic. [102]

We do our best to further our own nearby interests in a rational way, but we can take into account only what we know. We don't know what others are planning to do, until they do it. We rarely see the full range of possibilities before us. We often don't foresee (or choose to ignore) the impacts of our actions on the whole system. So instead of finding a long-term optimum, we discover within our limited purview a choice we can live with for now, and we stick to it, changing our behavior only when forced to. [106]

There are three ways to avoid the tragedy of the commons.
* Educate and exhort. Help people to see the consequences of unrestrained use of the commons. Appeal to their morality. Persuade them to be temperate. Threaten transgressors with social disapproval or eternal hellfire.
* Privatize the commons. Divide it up, so that each person reaps the consequences of his or her own actions. If some people lack the self-control to stay below the carrying capacity of their own private resource, those people will harm only themselves and not others.
* Regulate the commons. Garrett Hardin calls this option, bluntly, 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.' Regulation can take many forms, from outright bans on certain behaviors to quotas, permits, taxes, incentives. To be effective, regulation must be enforced by policing and penalties. [119]


Regulation makes an indirect feedback link from the condition of the resource through regulators to users. For this feedback to work, the regulators must have the expertise to monitor and interpret correctly the condition of the commons, they must have effective means of deterrence, and they must have the good of the whole community at heart. (They cannot be uninformed or weak or corrupt.) [119]

[Actually, all three different approaches require monitoring, enforcement and goodwill, but of different sorts.]

Most people comply with regulatory systems most of the time, as long as they are mutually agreed upon and their purpose is understood. But all regulatory systems must use police power and penalties for the occasional noncooperator. [121]

The competitive exclusion principle: the more the winner wins, the more he, she, or it can win in the future. If the winning takes place in a limited environment, such that everything the winner wins is extracted from the losers, the losers are gradually bankrupted, or forced out, or starved. [127]

Species and companies sometimes escape competitive exclusion by diversifying. ... Diversification is not guaranteed, however, especially if the monopolizing firm (or species) has the power to crush all offshoots, or buy them up, or deprive them of the resources the need to stay alive. Diversification doesn't work as a strategy for the poor. [129]

There are many devices to break the loop of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer: tax laws written (unbeatably) to tax the rich at higher rates than the poor; charity; public welfare; labor unions; universal and equal health care and education; taxation on inheritance (a way of starting the game over with each new generation). Most industrial societies have some combination of checks like these on the workings of the success-to-the-successful trap, in order to keep everyone in the game. Gift-giving cultures redistribute wealth through potlatches and other ceremonies that increase the social standing of the gift giver.
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. [130]

You have the problem of wrong goals when you find something stupid happening 'because it's the rule.' You have the problem of rule beating when you find something stupid happening because it's the way around the rule. Both of these system perversions can be going on at the same time with regard to the same rule. [141]

No one would think of using an America's Cup yacht for any purpose other than racing within the rules. The boats are so optimized around the present rules that they have lost all resilience. Any change in the rules would render them useless. [141]

[Evolved fragility]

You can often stabilize a system by increasing the capacity of a buffer. But if a buffer is too big, the system gets inflexible. It reacts too slowly. And big buffers of some sorts, such a water reservoirs or inventories, cost a lot to build or maintain. [150]

Physical structure is crucial in a system, but is rarely a leverage point because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place. After the structure is built, the leverage is in understanding its limitations and bottlenecks, using it with maximum efficiency, and refraining from fluctuations or expansions that strain its capacity. [151]

Delays that are too long cause damped, sustained, or exploding oscillations, depending on how much too long. Overlong delays in a system with a threshold, a danger point, a range past which irreversible damage can occur, cause overshoot and collapse. [152]

Strengthening and clarifying market signals, such as full-cost accounting, don't get far these days, because of the weakening of another set of balancing feedback loops - those of democracy. This great system was invented to put self-correcting feedback between the people and their government. The people, informed about what their elected representatives do, respond by voting those representatives in or out of office. The process depends on the free, full, unbiased flow of information back and forth between electorate and leaders. Billions of dollars are spent to limit and bias and dominate that flow of clear information. Give the people who want to distort market-price signals the power to influence government leaders, allow the distributors of information to be self-interested partners, and none of the necessary balancing feedback work well. Both market and democracy erode. [154]

[Commonwealth is stock. Democracy is balancing feedback loop. Market is reinforcing feedback loop.]

Reinforcing feedback loops are sources of growth, explosion, erosion, and collapse in systems. A system with an unchecked reinforcing loop ultimately will destroy itself. [155]

Reducing the gain around a reinforcing loop - slowing the growth - is usually a more powerful leverage point in systems than strengthening balancing loops, and far more preferable than letting the reinforcing loop run. [156]

[There's the rub. Slow growth and the system itself becomes competitively disadvantageous]

There are many reinforcing feedback loops in society that reward the winners of a competition with the resources to win even bigger next time - the 'success to the successful' trap. Rich people collect interest; poor people pay it. Rich people pay accountants and lean on politicians to reduce their taxes; poor people can't. Rich people give their kids inheritances and good educations. Antipoverty programs are weak balancing loops that try to counter these strong reinforcing ones. It would be much more effective to weaken the reinforcing loops. That's what progressive income tax, inheritance tax, and universal high-quality public education programs are meant to do. If the wealthy can influence government to weaken, rather than strengthen, those measures, then the government itself shifts from a balancing structure to one that reinforces success to the successful! [156]

There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That's why there are so man missing feedback loops - and why compelling feedback is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway). [157]

In a strict systems sense, there is no long-term, short-term distinction. Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago. The coupling between very fast processes and very slow ones are sometimes strong, sometimes weak. When the slow ones dominate, nothing seems to be happening; when the fast ones take over, things happen with breathtaking speed. Systems are always coupling and uncoupling the large and the small, the fast and the slow. [183]

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