24 quotes
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)
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)
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)
In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can't measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
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. [...] The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)
If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment but allocates little money or efforts toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)