Daniella H. Meadows – Thinking In Systems (2008)
Hoewel het boek voornamelijk een theoretisch kader bespreekt, zijn de door de auteur gekozen voorbeelden dusdanig ‘simpel’ gekozen dat het makkelijk leesbaar is. Sterker nog, het disfunctioneren van systemen uit het eigen referentiekader wordt overduidelijk. Cannot unsee.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefitted from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically, we would rather assume that the cause of a problem is ‘out here’, rather than ‘in here’. It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift the responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
The properties of highly functional systems – machines or human communities or ecosystems – that work well include one of these three characteristics:
- Resilience
- Self-organization
- Hierarchy
Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were numbers.
You can watch self-organizing systems form hierarchies. A self-employed person gets too much work and hires some helpers. A small, informal non-profit organization attracts many members and a bigger budget and one day the members decide, “Hey, we need someone to organize all this.”
If a team member is more interested in personal glory than the team winning, he or she can cause the team to lose. If a body call breaks free from its hierarchical function and starts multiplying wildly, we call it a cancer.
There will always be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren’t, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits.
Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructures. The tragedy of the commons that is crashing the world’s commercial fisheries occurs because there is little feedback from the state of the fish population to the decision to invest in fishing vessels. […] It is not price information but population information that is needed.
There is a systematic tendency on the part of human being to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops – and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective, if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).
There are no cheap tickets to mastery. You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of no-knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.
Seeing systems whole requires more than being ‘interdisciplinary’, if that word means – as it usually does – putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.