Thinking in systems : a primer

Thinking in Systems takes a LONG time to get going and deliver its value. All of the super insightful content is buried behind a LOT of lead-up.

The first half of the book is 3 stars. It dives into the fundamentals of systems thinking, describing numerous commonly found systems in detail. It's more of a reference and primer to set up the terminology and concepts for the second half of the book.

The second half of the book is 5 stars. It broadly describes how and why massive complex real-world systems operate the way they do. Using lots of real world examples from politics, economics, the environment, etc to explain common patterns, traps, and thoughts for remedies.

Best sections: Resiliency, bounded rationality, systems traps and opportunities, leverage points—places to intervene in a system, living in a world of systems.

It's worth considering reading these sections first, or jumping forward to them if the first half of the book begins to get tiring. The appendix is really good too, serving as an index to each of the best sections (strange and suboptimal way to structure the book, you almost want to read it backwards).

I'm thankful that the editor was able to pick up the manuscript and drive this book to completion after Donella's unexpected death. Such an incredible, experienced, caring worldview that Donella shared.

This was great. It's a recommended book for August Bradley's Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults course for Notion. I'm part of the first cohort of that course and it's all about mindset and systems thinking, two concepts that I'm hoping I can use to get my health and wealth in better positions.

It's a little scientific, but not so scientific that I got lost. I did try listening to the audiobook first and found that that didn't really work for me, so I got the Kindle Edition and that made a lot more sense. I have made a lot of highlights and they have been sucked into my knowledge vault in Notion, so I may well come back to this and write a longer review with some quotes and thoughts that they triggered, or maybe even a YouTube video as that's another area where I see some growth for me. That's exactly the sort of area where I see systems helping me in a big way.

This collection of writings provides a basic understanding of systems thinking, starting from first principles. It's referenced in a number of management and engineering books I've read, and references in blog posts are starting to appear more frequently.

One thing to understand about systems thinking is that it's really, really hard to get right in complex systems, and especially when people form an integral component of the system.

Fantastic. I already ordered a copy, so I could own this book. It's a primer about system thinking, which goes from the basics of understanding systems, to typical system traps, the ways of intervening in a system, to useful guidelines for living in a world of systems. It's all interspersed with real world examples (even though written nearly 3 decades ago, the talk of climate changes, oil resources, policy making etc, are all still spot on) and not too dense, which makes for a lucid and easy read.

The global economy is a big system, your thermostat is a simpler system. They can both be modeled with a toolkit of stocks, flows, feedback loops and delays. Putting mental models of systems onto paper is an incredibly important step when one wants to fix a problem or improve a situation (no matter if its your bank account, your general level of happiness, or world hunger). Instead of just being reactive to events, or applying bandages to wounds, one needs to observe and understand the many dependencies inside a system that are causally l linked. So this book is incredible for giving you an analytical frame of mind for how to look at the world.

Always incredibly topical are the negative traps that systems can get caught in: tragedy of the commons (we erode a common resource until it's unavailable to anyone), drift to low performance (setting the performance standard by past negative performances, instead of keeping it absolute), escalation (arms race of one-upping each other), success to the successful (the rich get richer), shifting the burden to the intervenor (reducing the symptoms, instead of solving the underlying problem) ...

Meadows lists a useful series of leverage points on how you can change systems (from simply tweaking parameters to altering flows to radically rebuilding the mind-set the system is based on). But she is also very humble and candid in her writing about how system thinking is no magic key, but rather a guideline. It's an analytical way of seeing the world, which removes a layer and shows us the gears beneath it.