What is a complex system? 

“You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.”
― Donella H. Meadows

Thinking in Systems - a primer

“The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and • hone our abilities to understand parts, • see interconnections, • ask “what-if ” questions about possible future behaviors, and • be creative and courageous about system redesign.”
― Donella H. Meadows

Systems Thinking - what it is 

The 6 key principles to think about complex systems: 

  1. Interconnectedness: Everything is connected.
  2. Synthesis: Understand the whole and the parts simultaneously, along with their relationships.
  3. Emergence: Be aware that there are no perfect solutions; choices impact other parts of the system.
  4. Feedback loops: Recognize how actions affect the system.
  5. Causality: Understand cause-and-effect relationships.
  6. Systems mapping: Visualize and analyze the system as a whole.

Structure Determines Behavior - Leverage Points to Intervene in a System

World leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virutally all problems, but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.    Growth has costs as well as benefits, but we typically don't count the costs - among which are porverty and hunger, environmental destruction, and so on -  the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth!  What is needed is much slower growth, and in somce cases no growth or negative growth. 

-Donella Meadows, Leverage Points

Prof. Russ Ackoff - System Improvement

This presentation is from a 1994 event hosted by Clare Crawford-Mason and Lloyd Dobyns to capture the Learning and Legacy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Russ knew Dr. Deming and speaks here about the difference between "continuous improvement" and "discontinuous improvement" as seen through the lens of systems thinking.

The Donella Meadows Project

The mission of the Donella Meadows Project is to preserve Donella (Dana) H. Meadows’s legacy as an inspiring leader, scholar, writer, and teacher; to manage the intellectual property rights related to Dana’s published work; to provide and maintain a comprehensive and easily accessible archive of her work online, including articles, columns, and letters; to develop new resources and programs that apply her ideas to current issues and make them available to an ever-larger network of students, practitioners, and leaders in social change.

Emergence

A system is a set of elements and relationships between those elements through which they form a whole. Thus when we look at a composite entity like a tree or a chair we could equally ask a different question from talking about the parts. We could ask how are the parts interrelated to form the whole organization. This is a very different way of looking at the world, this approach to reasoning about some entity is called synthesis. Where synthesis means "the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole.

Organizational Addictions: breaking the habit

From a systemic perspective, addiction is a very generic structure which is quite prevalent in both social and organizational settings.

The way an organization thinks about problems, or the policies that we pursue, can become addictions when we use them without consideration or choice, as an automatic knee-jerk response to a particular situation.