Dancing With Living Systems

No matter how well we understand systems we’ll never know everything. We’ll never be able to predict and control the situation completely. Instead we can design, redesign, and change dynamically along with the system.

Donella Meadows considered it a dance and put fourteen of her philosophical tips for learning the steps in the last chapter of her book. You can read an earlier version of the chapter as a public article hosted by Pegasus Communications, which featured it in a recent edition of the Leverage Points newsletter.

One of the more practical ones is to Use Language with Care and Enrich it with Systems Concepts. Because our shared information and mental models are primarily verbal, the words we choose to use to discuss the situation and the system do more than describe it. They shape the perception of it, which changes how we interact with it.

For example, we often discuss “creating jobs” as if it something only corporations do. Which is not going to inspire entrepreneurs to create their own jobs or find a way to grow exponentially more if they hire one person, even part time, to help with certain tasks. These things happen, but perhaps they happen in spite of the way we use language, not encouraged by it.

Meadows suggest two steps and notes that when she originally wrote Thinking in Systems, in 1993, she had to sustainability to her spell checker.

Step 1: Keep language concrete, meaningful, truthful, and clear.

Step 2: Create new words when necessary so that the language can fit our increasing understanding of systems and situations.

The other tips, which are elaborated on in the article and book, include:

• Get the Beat of the System
• Expose Your Mental Models to the Light of Day
• Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information
• Pay Attention to What is Important, Not Just What is Quantifiable
• Make Feedback Policies for Feedback Systems
• Go For the Good of the Whole
• Listen to the Wisdom of the System
• Locate Responsibility within the System
• Stay Humble – Stay a Learner
• Exand Time Horizons
• Defy the Disciplines
• Expand the Boundary of Caring
• Don’t Erode the Goal of Goodness

And my personal favorite, the one I’d like to leave you with, is to Celebrate Complexity, from which I pulled the following lyrical passage.

Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us. – Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems

This post is the ninth and last in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Also read my other posts:

1. Book Review: Thinking in Systems
2. What is a System?
3. Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
4. Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
5. Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
6. Why Systems Surprise Us
7. The Same Story Retold
8. Four Approaches to Changing Systems
9. Dancing with Living Systems

Please let me know if you enjoyed this series. Did you read the book? What did you think of it? Do you know of any books related to thinking towards the whole that you’d like to discuss in depth.