Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

Great book in general, highly recommended if you just have the curiosity to analyse and think about phenomena around you, because everything can be seen as a system so this book is a helpful guide on how to see and try to understand *everything*. ( )

shelved in HT Green Library - by Reception - Monograph Library (R)

Recommended to me by a coworker. Tries to teach you how to view problems not in isolation but as systems - interactions of many variables at once. Tries to help you identify the likely leverage points - places where you can most efficiently effect changes in the system, hopefully in the direction you want (not guaranteed). ( )

Not having spent much time on systems I consider this a good introduction. It avoids all the math and approaches systems rather from the viewpoint of how they should be interpreted, which was delightful.

I think the most important thing I learned from this book was how hierarchies emerge naturally. I had not considered the possibility that it was more natural for evolution to create simple things that connect as modules rather than complex things that serve the same purpose as a collection of modules. This point of view has certainly changed my world view to the better. ( )

I found the first half of this book to be very difficult to get through, not because it was impenetrable, but because it just didn't excite me. Once I ground through and made it to the second half, I found it more interesting.

This may reflect part of how the book was written, but it also says something more abstract: the systems thinking Meadows discusses here originated in engineering, but its practitioners soon discovered that they had transcended technocracy. "(W)e found whole disciplines, libraries, histories, asking the same questions, and to some extent offering answers," Meadows notes. "...(T)he tool of systems thinking, born out of engineering and mathematics, implemented in computers, drawn from a mechanistic mind-set and a quest for prediction and control, leads its practitioners... to confront the most deeply human mysteries." The book mirrored that structure, beginning very technically and gradually becoming more philosophical — in other words, moving into my intellectual wheelhouse.

This isn't a paradigm-shifting book (despite its helpful exhortations to shift and transcend paradigms) but it does offer some useful insights into how to think about complex systems and errors to avoid. (Many come down to not addressing only the symptoms of a problem, or only one aspect of a complicated problem, and expecting to achieve anything more.) Helpful for people who have a high opinion of humans' ability as active agents to control our world, or for people who have a low view of human agency and sees us as largely passive bystanders. Meadows lies in the middle, and urges us to be realistic about what we can't change easily but to recognize how we can affect change. ( )