35 quotes
Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.
Meadows (1980)
The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.
Meadows (2000)
Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Why are they [people] more likely to listen to people who tell them they can't make changes than they are to people who tell them they can?
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Economies are extremely complex systems; they are full of balancing feedback loops with delays and they are inherently oscillatory.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
There always will be limits to growth.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Changing the length of a delay may utterly change behavior. [...] Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing it with all their might in the wrong direction.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
How is it that one way of seeing the world becomes so widely shared that institutions, technologies, production systems, buildings, cities, become shaped around that way of seeing?
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. [...] But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, if we don't speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there.
Dancing with Systems: What to do when systems resist change (2001)
The least obvious part of a system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)