Donella medaow the system lens professional#

It is inevitable that this professional perspective engenders a very distinctive (but always disputable) way of evaluating systems behavior. Then the book is anchored in the normative perspective of an engineer who is interested in the dynamics of depletion of natural resources.

Donella medaow the system lens how to#

Epistemologically the book oscillates between a naive realism (there is complexity out there and we can model it more or less faithfully) and a muddled constructivism (we can’t really know what is out there but models are a useful construct to structure our interaction with the world with the aim to progressively learn about how to deal with the friction and problems in that world).But my feeling is that this informality hides a rather annoying conceptual incoherence. As a primer, it’s perfectly fine that a book skids over some of the finer points of the theory. My misgivings are prompted by two elements, one internal to the book and one related to its effects in the outside world. The final chapter is worth rereading time and again.Īnd yet one also has to be critical about this book. It acquaints the reader with the basic vocabulary and offers a powerful toolbox. Thinking in Systems offers a lot of bang for the buck. Finally, the book closes with a short chapter of systems wisdom to help us to navigate ‘a world of systems’. Alternatively the Ladder can also be used to diagnose why a system doesn’t work as well as it should be. In Chapter 6 the focus is on the famous Meadows Ladder, a hierarchical framework of leverage points that offers a powerful heuristic to reflect on ways to intervene in a system to help it to function better. These are simple causal loop models that help us to understand and articulate the mechanics behind these pernicious dynamics. Chapter 5 inventorises a number of these system traps, conceptualised as system archetypes. This leads to errors of judgement on our part which, in interaction with these systems, leads to all kinds of undesirable effects. The way our brain works happens to be maladapted to the complexity and non-linearity that is characteristic for many real world systems. Chapter 4 (‘Why systems surprise us’) addresses the consequences of humans’ bounded rationality. A very brief third chapter foregrounds desirable systems properties: resilience, self-organisation and hierarchy. Chapter 2 surveys different types of systems and the dynamic behaviour that is associated to them. In the first chapter Meadows introduces the basic vocabulary: stocks, flows and feedback loops. It also offers a number of practical thinking tools to approach knotty problems. This book is not about mathematics, however, but addresses the underlying ideas. It relies on a mathematical formalism to translate a system’s properties into a dynamic trajectory. System dynamics is a modelling discipline. Whenever we wonder about a system’s behaviour over time, the system dynamics lens may help us to deepen our understanding of the underlying structures. Similarly, when we are curious about the reasons why an organisation stagnates and is unable to lift itself out of a rut.

Asking ourselves why a given phenomenon (take climate change), exhibits an escalation behaviour, we might fruitfully turn to the conceptual apparatus of system dynamics to answer that question. This body of knowledge helps us to understand the dynamics of a system. “A simple book for and about a complex world.” It’s a gentle introduction to specifically the subfield of system dynamics. And successfully so, as the voice that narrates this story is unmistakably Donella’s, as we know it from her other publications. Diana Wright edited and restructured the material to make it publishable. Thinking in Systems was posthumously published based on a draft manuscript that had been circulating for years. Read on.ĭonella Meadows died in 2001 at the age of 59. Still, I am also going to be critical about it. This is probably the only title in the field that deserves the status of bestseller. Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems is for many the first book on systems thinking they read.