Thinking in systems : a primer

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.