Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the world’s complexity by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than splitting it into parts—an intellectual challenge anyone can take.
| This post is part of a reading series on Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows. To quickly access all chapters, please click here. Disclaimer: This chapter summary is personal work and an invitation to read the book itself for a detailed view of all the author’s ideas. |
“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 may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.” (Donella H. Meadows) That quote from the author may seem both unsettling and plain common sense.
On the one hand, we have been trained to focus on events and phenomena by dividing them into small and understandable pieces, thus solving problems under a direct line of thinking. A virus causes the flu; politicians cause recessions; oil-exporting nations make oil prices rise; competitors beat one another, etc. On the other hand, we intuitively recognize the intrinsic complexity of the world. Our bodies, for instance, are magnificent examples of integrated, interconnected, self-maintaining complexity. Yet, ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Our thinking pattern is to put things at a distance from one another as if they could function independently. Looking at the world around us this way makes us follow circumstantial causes and conditions and miss the broader structural dynamics.
“Serious problems,” says the author, “have been solved by focusing on external agents—preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. 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.” This is because we do not acknowledge the system structures that produce them. We must, therefore, “see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”