Thinking in Systems

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

That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!

interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

A system is a set of things

latent within the structure of the spring

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.

Modern systems theory, bound up with computers and equations, hides the fact that it traffics in truths known at some level by everyone. It is often possible, therefore, to make a direct translation from systems jargon to traditional wisdom.