Chapter 7: Living in a world of systems

  • Self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are:

    • inherently unpredictable

    • not controllable

    • understandable only in the most general way

  • List of lessons, concepts & practices

  • 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

    • 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