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Thinking in Systems

Thinking in Systems

Highlights

Some interconnections in systems are actual physical flows, such as the water in the tree’s trunk or the students progressing through a university. Many interconnections are flows of information—signals that go to decision points or action points within a system. These kinds of interconnections are often harder to see, but the system reveals them to those who look. ^ref-37714

Systems can be nested within systems. Therefore, there can be purposes within purposes. ^ref-49361

Stocks change over time through the actions of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system. ^ref-26028

You’ll be thinking not in terms of a static world, but a dynamic one. You’ll stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior. ^ref-24283

There’s an important general principle here, and also one specific to the thermostat structure. First the general one: 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 decisions he or she makes will affect only future behavior. ^ref-26576

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