Chapter 7: Living in a world of systems

Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are:

Systems that are inherently unpredictable, not controllable, and can only be understood in a general way.

Get the beat of the system

• Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves 

• Reasons to start with the behaviour of the system: 

  • forces you to focus on facts, not theories 

  • keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions 

  • keeps you from falling too quickly for the beliefs of others

  • directs one’s thoughts to dynamic(open to ideas), not static, analysis 

• Reasons to start with the history of variables:

  • begins to suggest not only what elements are in the system but how they might be interconnected 

Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day

• Our models have to be complete & have to add up & have to be consistent 

• Mental flexibility = the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure

• Practice the scientific method:

  • Getting models into the light of day 

  • Making them as rigorous as possible 

  • Testing them against evidence 

  • Being willing to scuttle them if they are no longer supported 

Honour, Respect & Distribute Information

• Most of what goes wrong in systems is often due to biased, late, or missing information 

• You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information 

• Information is power

Pay Attention to What is Important, Not Just What Is Quantifiable

• Be a quality detector

• It’s not only quantity. It’s also quality

Make Feedback Policies for Feedback Systems

• The best policies not only contain feedback loops but meta-feedback loops 

• Meta-feedback loop:

  • loops that alter, correct & expand loops 

  • policies that design learning into the management process / learning from what you’ve learned

    • Example:

      • Hospital flood in Katrina, bought generators, kayak

Go for the Good of the Whole

• Hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, NOT the top

• Do not maximize parts of the systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole 

• Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience & sustainability

Listen to the Wisdom of the System

• Aid & encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself 

• Notice how many of those forces & structures are at the bottom of the hierarchy

• Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what is already there

Locate Responsibility in the System

• Looking for the ways the system creates its own behaviour 

• Intrinsic responsibility = the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly & quickly & compellingly to the decision makers

• Our culture rarely looks for responsibility within the system that generates an action & poorly designed systems that experiences the consequences of actions

Stay Humble - Stay a Learner

• Means what is appropriate when you are learning is:

  • small steps

  • constant monitoring

  • willingness to change course

  • making mistakes & admitting them (called “error-embracing”)

Celebrate Complexity

• The universe:

  • is messy, nonlinear, turbulent & dynamic 

  • self-organizes & evolves 

  • creates diversity & uniformity

Expand Time Horizons

• In a strict systems sense, there is no long-term & short-term distinction

• Actions taken now have some immediate effects & some that radiate out for decades to come

Defy the Disciplines

• Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary” (means relating to more than one branch of knowledge)

• The representatives from various disciplines have to:

  • go into learning mode

  • admit ignorance 

  • be willing to be taught by each other & by the system 

Expand the Boundary of Caring

• means expanding the horizons of caring

Don’t Erode the Goal of Goodness

• The archetype “drift to low performance” is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality

• The gap between desired behaviour & actual behaviour narrows