Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems: A Primer, ed. Diana Wright (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008) is a gem for those of us seeking to make sense of complex systems. Early in her career, she worked with Jay Forrester on Limits to Growth, a topic discussed in some detail in my most recent essay. Limits to Growth remains an important point of discussion, and it was famous for its rigorous way of modeling problems in the economy.
Thinking in Systems is itself an interesting work that was never meant for publication. Instead, it was drafted as a guide for other researchers working on systems-wide problems. After Meadows passed away at a young age in 2001, this book was edited and published to wider circulation.
The content of the book is critical to making sense of life in the 21st century: there are no easy answers, and we can only truly find solutions by looking at the systems that surround a given issue.
The first chapter begins simply enough, with a definition of systems and their components. In Meadows’s telling, all systems are made up of three things: elements, interconnections, and purpose. To give an infrastructural example, we might look at the energy usage. “Elements” include houses and electrical plants, “interconnections” are the pipes that connect them, and the “purpose” could be something like “providing equitable use of energy” or “ensuring people stay warm in the winter.” These last two purposes are entirely different, and the nature of the system will change depending on which purpose the system has.
Elements and interconnections are defined by a few other concepts like “stocks” (quantities of a given thing) and “flows” (which move stocks to a different place). However, when there are multiple different stocks and flows, systems change tremendously.
Also significant to systems is the concept of “feedback.” Feedback might be automatic, or it might be manual. Take a cooling system, for instance, which is a feedback loop. The system will trigger the air conditioner to cool the house. When the thermostat detects that the temperature is 20°C, it will deactivate. Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately for us, systems are never truly self-contained. Cooling systems are always working against outside temperatures, which means that there are actually two feedback loops. Outdoor temperature is tied to larger climatic cycles, further complicating our cooling system.
In real life, all things are interconnected, meaning that it isn’t possible to hermetically seal a system. Yet, Meadows argues, for the sake of measurement and analysis, we must create our own boundaries for a system. The exact location of the boundary will determine both the quality and meaning of the analysis. We don’t have to have perfect limits here: we only need that they are good enough for whatever aim we set out.
Because of its many different parts, systems often function in unintuitive ways. What we discover may very well surprise us, and it might be helpful to accept this surprise without too much resistance. This is why systems thinking matters: the answers we might find through thinking in systems will not come to us in other ways. It is only by examining parts in relation to a larger system can we find answers about economies, societies, infrastructure, and most of the sciences.
It is worth noting that the book is written at an introductory level: for those more experienced in systems thinking, it will make a good refresher, but there will be little here that’s new. For those unaccustomed to thinking in systems, Meadows book will be a welcome addition to their library.
