Thinking in systems
A clear, thoughtful, and wide-reaching exploration of complex systems, in theory and in practice. Meadows was a masterful and elegant writer and researcher, and an early voice in systems analysis at MIT and elsewhere. This book, completed from draft manuscript after Meadows' death, is both accessible and deeply thought-provoking. She connects the dots between careful descriptions of systems analysis and systems insights, and the personal, social, societal, and political implications of systems thinking.
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124recommend
202mentions
163people
2010–2026years
72% recommend27% neutral1% critical
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- Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows
My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.
Silo series by Hugh Howey
I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?
- The quote you replied to is used to educate a reader how to understand an existing system. For example, it helps one understand why a system is in a state when as you say 'there's not necessarily anyone who wants' it that way. Rivers are polluted because there are some factors in the system which enable it.
Also, as the video I linked in the previous comment says: 'our first instinct is to blame people in the system and that is a low leverage response...actions people take are possible, feasible, and rational because of the universe in which they exist.'
I am not sure if you've read the book. But even though you've not used terms like feedback loops, etc. I think what you are saying is not much different from what the book says.
If interested, a chapter wise summary of Thinking In Systems https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL6RiAl2WHXEU04zFYyWr...
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows. More things I lived and worked on would had made more sense if I had read it a decade earlier.
There had been a lot books that were influential, but appeared not too long before I read them. But some had been around for long and were been widely known, so the opportunities for reading them earlier were bigger. The Selfish Gene is in that category.
- What kinds of actionable plans ever result from blaming people (as a category)? Where will it get you? Expecting some people to behave differently... just "because"? What kinds of plans flow downstream from blaming human nature? What's the plan? Does it help you somehow, practically? Or is it mostly about feeling better somehow?
If the plan is persuasion, putting blame aside goes a long way.
If you want to make change based in the real world, you could do worse that reading and absorbing "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows.
- I'm in several Slack teams for non profits and professional orgs, Teams for a client or two, IRC and Matrix servers for digital archiving ops, Signal/WhatsApp/GroupMe/Telegram groups, etc. I have been in tech for 25+ years, I am familiar with the extremes. You are right, things can be bad, that is the point of systems engineering: to drive directionally towards continual improvement. Success is never assured, but throwing our hands up and giving up is not reasonable. Make a plan, work the plan. Default to action. Work is hard.
I recommend "Thinking in Systems" by Donella H. Meadows (ISBN13 9781603580557) on this topic [1]. It's ~$10 on Amazon as of this comment, and the PDF is easy to find with a quick web search.
[1] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W/Thinking_in_systems
- The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger is a good place to start.
Shane's mental models books are packed with a lot of random/disparate domains/insights -- He's a good aggregator there.
Thinking in Systems by Meadows.
Really, once you go down the rabbit hole, you find new threads to pull. That's kind of the fun of it
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