Thinking in Systems

I recommend this book sparingly only because the reader needs to be ready. They need “ears to hear” as an obscure dissident and moral philosopher once said.

It’s generally considered one of the most important books on Systems Thinking. It’s a collection of works by Donella Meadows edited and published posthumously, after her lifetime of work in the discipline.

My first reading of the book was revelatory. I learned some things, sure, but more than anything it gave scaffolding and brought organization to concepts, patterns, feelings, and frameworks that had been simmering on the stove of my mind for years.

First tedium.

Roughly a third of the book is “in the weeds” basics on elements of systems and Systems Thinking. For many readers, perhaps you, it can feel tedious. I became more circumspect in my recommendation of this book after people said they gave up because the discussion of thermostats was tedious.

“Ah,” I said to myself. “if they can’t consider a thermostat maybe they’re not ready.”

The middle third of the book is about looking around and seeing systems in the world around you. How and why they work, how they fail. It evolves the basics into concepts that are shared by many systems. It brings useful scaffolding for starting to apply Systems Thinking. People who do get through the thermostat talk will find tools here that help them start to recognize, understand, and diagnose the systems around them.

Then Revelation.

The last third of the book is, for me, where the revelation came. Observing humans and the world, I had already come to the conclusion that, for example, changing hearts and minds (while not easy) was far more effective than changing laws. And that systems concerned purely with the mechanics of a process would always become machines whose gears would grind humanity to pieces. Sometimes literally.

The third section of the book is two chapters: Leverage Points–Places to Intervene in a System and Living in a World of Systems. This is where on my first reading the book met me where I was and brought organization to those things that had been on my mind for so long. There are so many ways to try and affect change, where does one start? Complex systems are all around us, how do we avoid the gears when we can and help others do the same? These chapters will set you on a journey to answering those questions for yourself.

Stay humble or, should you call yourself enlightened?

I remember my first reading of the Leverage Points chapter very well. It presents methods for intervening in a system to create change, presenting them in ascending order of effectiveness. It’s a great and fascinating read. Near the end of the chapter is this passage:

There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.

From the word “unattached” in the second sentence I thought “Yes”, “Yes exactly”, “This is EXACTLY what I mean”, “THIS is what I’m always trying to say!” “YES!”

That passage is followed by this sentence:

It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.

So now, my friend, I was in a pickle. This book had been helping put my experiences, observations, and learning into a coherent framework for thinking about the world, living in it, and creating change. And at perhaps the pinnacle of that framework, or at least my enthusiastic agreement with it, it declared the mindset I found so resonant to be, in some fashion, enlightened. That threw cold water on my enthusiastic agreement let me tell you.

At any rate I think calling yourself enlightened is a sure signal that one is not enlightened. So perhaps another time.

Having ears to hear, or not.

I think that one of the reasons people don’t “have ears to hear” about Systems Thinking, at least in this book, is that Systems Thinking is something of a meta-discipline. Application of the tools to a project in front of you (a workflow, user experience design, a company, a process, etc.) is your responsibility. There aren’t Systems Thinking hacks or quick tips or hot takes that will help you “get leverage” or that you can send to your team on Slack thinking it will solve their problems. You won’t find a book or resource for “How to apply Systems Thinking to [the exact challenge in front of you right now]”. One defining aspect of Systems Thinking is that it considers The Whole, not only The Elements.

Applying Systems Thinking to a process must consider the processes and inputs that came before, the person or automation executing the process, the teams impacted by it, how the output of the process is used not just in the next process, but in the rest of the processes in the line. So if you find a resource written for solving your exact challenge, it’s not Systems Thinking by definition. At best it’s advice from someone who did something like this before.

What we’re talking about when we talk about Systems Thinking

This book is important, even if many people don’t “have ears to hear”, because recent discussions confuse or co-opt the term.

I see a fair amount of occupation and promotion of a false form of Systems Thinking in response to AI tooling. “The most important skill now is Systems Thinking”, “We’re hiring Systems Thinkers” statements from companies and people who have a read-one-blog-post-about-systems-thinking level of understanding of the discipline. If that.

People co-opt terms to sound smart. It happens everywhere, all the time. It devalues the discipline and the work of experts in that discipline.

When I listen to these conversations, typically it’s, to be generous, something more like “thinking systematically”, “thinking in diagrams”, or “thinking in n8n workflows”. Valuable skills perhaps but these are not Systems Thinking any more than “knowing Excel” is “running a discounted cash flow analysis”.

People with this mindset would do well to consider that there is something they could learn from a woman born in 1941 who devoted her life to Systems Thinking.