10 ms·

A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

284 points by gorm 5y ago

gumby 5y ago
> Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary... Disciplines are taken by science to represent different parts of the reality we experience. In effect, science assumes that reality is structured and organized in the same way universities are. Not just the sciences. Rigid, path-dependent taxonomies are a plague in all disciplines and in daily life.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  it's especially a plague in medicine, though I'm reliably informed that a new movement within the medical establishment called integrative medicine may help to start treating human health as a system, not a collection of disparate parts.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I don’t know if it’s a plague. I see value in both approaches and going to one extreme or the other seems unhealthy. You want generalists to be working with specialists. Just generalists or just specialists won’t perform as well as a healthy mix and going to one extreme let’s the other outcompete you in certain areas.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    the plague is that right now we _are_ going to one extreme - the extreme of separation and specialisation. Systems thinkers want the two integrated, they don't want to throw out analysis and replace it with synthesis, they want the combination (synthesis!) of the two.
    - gumby 5y ago
      The reason I say “plague” is that effort and discussion (not just public discussion) focus on the map, not the territory itself. Just look at us politics today: the discussions around “infrastructure” and “defense” are hobbled by the descriptions of those words rather than addressing the structural issues themselves.
karmakaze 5y ago
It's the guy, Russell Ackoff! I still remember reading all about Systems Thinking from year 1. Do they still use the same material in Systems Design Engineering?
ryanschneider 5y ago
> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection of people, if those people aren’t satisfied with the work they will move on and delivering value to investors will be that much harder. So maximize for worker happiness while delivering enough ROI to your investors, not the other way around.
- mathattack 5y ago
  It’s a subtle distinction between labor and capital. And gets blurred by debt vs equity. Who owns the company? The people who work there? The person who founded it? The people who the founders sold shares to? Or the people who lent it money? Legally it’s the people who own shares. And if they miss their debt payments, it’s the lenders. Companies can inform their shareholders “if you want to invest, here is how we operate differently.” Bezos and Buffet both do that in terms of defining focus and time horizons. One may want to optimize for worker happiness first, but that’s not legal ownership. (Employee engagement is a predictor of shareholder return, but it’s hard to measure, and different from happiness)
  - adamcstephens 5y ago
    Except the quote isn’t about legal ownership it all. It’s about who has skin in the game, and who actually makes the company function. The vast majority of shareholders have very little skin in the game, while the employees of the company absolutely have a lot of skin in the game. The employees depend on the company for their livelihood, whereas a shareholder is generally just trying to make money on their money.
    - mathattack 5y ago
      I view him as defining value as to accrue to stakeholders, with employees as primary. One way to frame the question is “If the company gets a million dollar windfall, who should get it?” Employees? Owners? Even the most customer centric company won’t say a cash payment to customers, though they may say improving service or R and D.
timepaas1977 5y ago
Shiva Aayadurai also had some great content on this topic.. we need more of such people to carry the message forward in next generations
Cybotron5000 5y ago
Articles like this really drive home to me how much I appreciate this site and all it’s contributors and commenters. Thank you all!
adamnemecek 5y ago
Site’s down https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystemsthinker.com/a-lifetime-of-systems-thinking/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystem...
solatic 5y ago
> The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. Yes and no. Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt has a different take (one I agree with), which argues that the educational system is dedicated to producing political discipline. Yes, this serves the interest of the teachers, and no, the system is not designed to produce learning. But it's highly arguable whether you could truly design, build, and sustainably run an institution which reliably produces autodidacts and independent thinkers, particularly at higher levels, particularly since it's difficult to impossible to measure how reliably such an institution is succeeding at its mission.
- charles_f 5y ago
  I think the point here is on instructionism vs. constructionism - learning by experience (constructing things) seem to work better and in particular for long term assimilation than learning from instructors telling you. I think Epstein was putting it in Range as something along the lines of "you need to struggle to really learn". Constructionism can take many forms, from hands on projects and workshops, to frequent internships and apprenticeships.
  - solatic 5y ago
    Right. My point is that I'm not convinced that hands-on projects and workshops, when force-fed to students within the context of a course taken at an educational institution, is inherently more effective than any other teaching method. As someone whose career is in software engineering, and who never had much interest in any of the sciences outside software engineering, I certainly remember having to do hands-on projects in required chemistry, biology, and physics courses... not that I remember much, if any, of it at all. The vast majority of true academic learning is self-directed, and the value of experience is in making mistakes that you are forced to bear the consequences of. "Consequences" do not really exist in a classroom (almost by definition), and grades (particularly in an era of grade inflation that renders them largely meaningless) do not count.
  - aethertap 5y ago
    I've been homeschooling my children for about four years, and figuring out how to achieve experiential learning has been a primary goal for the entire time. It has been very tricky for me to get it right, because there is a constant need to balance between over- and under-challenging them, and the process of struggling that's so crucial to learning is also self-defeating because it generates so much frustration. Emotional resilience is a skill that I think is foundational to being able to learn in this way, but it's been glossed over in the materials I've read on constructivist learning. The closest I've seen is the material about growth mindsets, but it's generally vastly oversimplified in my opinion. The approach I'm currently working with is to ask them to do difficult tasks (such as math problems that don't have a straightforward, mechanical process to produce an answer), then I watch them work. When they get stuck, I try to get them to explore what they know and think about what would help them break a bit of new ground, but so far it's been very hard to guide without showing. Generally, they struggle for a bit and then I show them a couple of ways in which they could make progress. This seems to have very good results, but I can't imagine how it could be institutionalized effectively when you start to get beyond the most elementary topics. Even with only two students it's challenging to manage.
charles_f 5y ago
I liked the article ; one additional lesson I got from it is that you should not change your writing paradigm mid post. The first few bullets are things that he's disproving. Then they're things he concluded. I had to read again to understand he changed his writing
throwawayboise 5y ago
> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future. I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"? Or does this mean something else?
- dminor 5y ago
  I think he's saying the interactive manager doesn't guess what the future will be and plot a course for success in that future, but rather asks what would be ideal right now and plots a course to achieve that ideal.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  There was a recent Chess topic[0] that should help explain better. Basically all the engines in Chess start with the present position, and try to look into the future move by move. To be able to find the winning position like that is almost impossible for the position they were looking at. And yet, if you give the idea to an average Chess player, they will work out how to get a Checkmate. They will do so by finding Mate, then working back on how to get the board to that state. They will find the winning position when they reach the current state. He's simply taken this idea and generalized it further to more than Chess. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188854
- brody_hamer 5y ago
  I’ve heard this put another way, when someone asked me: “what did the ideal version of yourself do differently today?” Which I found to be a dramatically different, and dramatically easier question to answer than something like “where do you want to be in 5 years?” I found it help me shift away from trying to make predictions, and towards making healthy, productive (not self-sabotaging), well-rounded decisions with obvious long term benefits.
  - RHSman2 5y ago
    Brilliant
kqr2 5y ago
The Six Revelations from the article: Improving the performance of the parts of a system taken separately will not necessarily improve the performance of the whole; in fact, it may harm the whole. Problems are not disciplinary in nature but are holistic. The best thing that can be done to a problem is not to solve it but to dissolve it. The healthcare system of the United States is not a healthcare system; it is a sickness and disability-care system. The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.
- bsder 5y ago
  > The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. 1) The education system is designed to corral children for working hours so their parents can be cogs in the machine. 2) The education system is designed to produce a minimum competence so that the students can eventually become cogs in the machine. At no point was the public education system designed for anything significantly different from "average". Any effective excursions from average are a result of some exceptional teacher bucking the system rather than being helped by it.
  - jmcqk6 5y ago
    People keep using the phrase "the education system is designed", but it really wasn't. People who say this really have no idea about the history of public education in this country, nor it's ongoing operation. The system has been a tool used by some to advance their own selfish goals, but it's hard to say things about the system as a whole that is is actually honestly applicable across the entire system. And it's even more complicated by the grudges people hold against the terrible teachers they had. it's understandable. Teachers hold important positions of authority in our most vulnerable and developing years. When they do not do what's best for us, it's a massive betrayal, and I can see why many would hold onto that and allow that to shape their entire view of the system. But it is an extremely skewed view.
mrfredward 5y ago
Somewhat buried, but this my favorite takeaway >Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems. Since mistakes are a no-no in most corporations, and the only mistakes identified and measured are ones involving doing something that should not have been done, the best strategy for managers is to do as little as possible. No wonder managerial paralysis prevails in American organizations. I've seen bright forward thinking leaders who delivered results get canned when one reasonable bet doesn't pay off, but mostly I've watched decision-makers stall when action is badly needed. This explains very succinctly what is wrong with so many places I've worked.
- tomnipotent 5y ago
  > but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems Except for actual accountants, for whom I can attest certainly do hunt down omissions. Especially when it's not your money you're spending.
rawgabbit 5y ago
Here is a PDF version of the article. Apparently its from a 1999 speech given at Villanova. https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501pk.pdf https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501...
bjterry 5y ago
I have been thinking a lot about Systems Thinking recently. Will Larson writes in An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management that it's one of the most useful general tools he's discovered for approaching management problems. That inspired me to read Donella Meadows Thing in Systems, but even after reading that, I'm not sure how to apply it to engineering organizations. It's only tangential to this topic, but if anyone has a good course or book that works through examples which can be transferred to managing engineering teams or organizations, I'd be grateful. When I read most systems thinking materials I get the sense that they are mostly focused on civilization-level problems like global warming, rather than on ways that I can individually use it to understand and make changes within my more prosaic scope. I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested. I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.
- gerbler 5y ago
  Have you come across Business Dynamics by John Sterman? It's essentially Meadows approach applied to the business environment, including thinking about general organizational structure.
  - bjterry 5y ago
    Thanks, this is a great recommendation based on the Amazon reviews!
- michael1999 5y ago
  Toyota and their production system comes to mind as the prototype of a system oriented company that transformed their industry. And Ford, in the original.
- bmitc 5y ago

284 points by gorm 5y ago

> Effective research is not disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary; it is transdisciplinary... Disciplines are taken by science to represent different parts of the reality we experience. In effect, science assumes that reality is structured and organized in the same way universities are. Not just the sciences. Rigid, path-dependent taxonomies are a plague in all disciplines and in daily life.

beaconstudios 5y ago
it's especially a plague in medicine, though I'm reliably informed that a new movement within the medical establishment called integrative medicine may help to start treating human health as a system, not a collection of disparate parts.
vlovich123 5y ago
I don’t know if it’s a plague. I see value in both approaches and going to one extreme or the other seems unhealthy. You want generalists to be working with specialists. Just generalists or just specialists won’t perform as well as a healthy mix and going to one extreme let’s the other outcompete you in certain areas.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  the plague is that right now we _are_ going to one extreme - the extreme of separation and specialisation. Systems thinkers want the two integrated, they don't want to throw out analysis and replace it with synthesis, they want the combination (synthesis!) of the two.
  - gumby 5y ago
    The reason I say “plague” is that effort and discussion (not just public discussion) focus on the map, not the territory itself. Just look at us politics today: the discussions around “infrastructure” and “defense” are hobbled by the descriptions of those words rather than addressing the structural issues themselves.

karmakaze 5y ago

It's the guy, Russell Ackoff! I still remember reading all about Systems Thinking from year 1. Do they still use the same material in Systems Design Engineering?

ryanschneider 5y ago

> The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation. Providing the shareholders with a return on their investments is a requirement, not an objective. I love this quote. At first it sounds very critical, but thinking about it more it reveals something deeper: companies are a collection of people, if those people aren’t satisfied with the work they will move on and delivering value to investors will be that much harder. So maximize for worker happiness while delivering enough ROI to your investors, not the other way around.

mathattack 5y ago
It’s a subtle distinction between labor and capital. And gets blurred by debt vs equity. Who owns the company? The people who work there? The person who founded it? The people who the founders sold shares to? Or the people who lent it money? Legally it’s the people who own shares. And if they miss their debt payments, it’s the lenders. Companies can inform their shareholders “if you want to invest, here is how we operate differently.” Bezos and Buffet both do that in terms of defining focus and time horizons. One may want to optimize for worker happiness first, but that’s not legal ownership. (Employee engagement is a predictor of shareholder return, but it’s hard to measure, and different from happiness)
- adamcstephens 5y ago
  Except the quote isn’t about legal ownership it all. It’s about who has skin in the game, and who actually makes the company function. The vast majority of shareholders have very little skin in the game, while the employees of the company absolutely have a lot of skin in the game. The employees depend on the company for their livelihood, whereas a shareholder is generally just trying to make money on their money.
  - mathattack 5y ago
    I view him as defining value as to accrue to stakeholders, with employees as primary. One way to frame the question is “If the company gets a million dollar windfall, who should get it?” Employees? Owners? Even the most customer centric company won’t say a cash payment to customers, though they may say improving service or R and D.

timepaas1977 5y ago

Shiva Aayadurai also had some great content on this topic.. we need more of such people to carry the message forward in next generations

Cybotron5000 5y ago

Articles like this really drive home to me how much I appreciate this site and all it’s contributors and commenters. Thank you all!

adamnemecek 5y ago

Site’s down https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystemsthinker.com/a-lifetime-of-systems-thinking/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210606160159/https://thesystem...

solatic 5y ago

> The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. Yes and no. Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt has a different take (one I agree with), which argues that the educational system is dedicated to producing political discipline. Yes, this serves the interest of the teachers, and no, the system is not designed to produce learning. But it's highly arguable whether you could truly design, build, and sustainably run an institution which reliably produces autodidacts and independent thinkers, particularly at higher levels, particularly since it's difficult to impossible to measure how reliably such an institution is succeeding at its mission.

charles_f 5y ago
I think the point here is on instructionism vs. constructionism - learning by experience (constructing things) seem to work better and in particular for long term assimilation than learning from instructors telling you. I think Epstein was putting it in Range as something along the lines of "you need to struggle to really learn". Constructionism can take many forms, from hands on projects and workshops, to frequent internships and apprenticeships.
- solatic 5y ago
  Right. My point is that I'm not convinced that hands-on projects and workshops, when force-fed to students within the context of a course taken at an educational institution, is inherently more effective than any other teaching method. As someone whose career is in software engineering, and who never had much interest in any of the sciences outside software engineering, I certainly remember having to do hands-on projects in required chemistry, biology, and physics courses... not that I remember much, if any, of it at all. The vast majority of true academic learning is self-directed, and the value of experience is in making mistakes that you are forced to bear the consequences of. "Consequences" do not really exist in a classroom (almost by definition), and grades (particularly in an era of grade inflation that renders them largely meaningless) do not count.
- aethertap 5y ago
  I've been homeschooling my children for about four years, and figuring out how to achieve experiential learning has been a primary goal for the entire time. It has been very tricky for me to get it right, because there is a constant need to balance between over- and under-challenging them, and the process of struggling that's so crucial to learning is also self-defeating because it generates so much frustration. Emotional resilience is a skill that I think is foundational to being able to learn in this way, but it's been glossed over in the materials I've read on constructivist learning. The closest I've seen is the material about growth mindsets, but it's generally vastly oversimplified in my opinion. The approach I'm currently working with is to ask them to do difficult tasks (such as math problems that don't have a straightforward, mechanical process to produce an answer), then I watch them work. When they get stuck, I try to get them to explore what they know and think about what would help them break a bit of new ground, but so far it's been very hard to guide without showing. Generally, they struggle for a bit and then I show them a couple of ways in which they could make progress. This seems to have very good results, but I can't imagine how it could be institutionalized effectively when you start to get beyond the most elementary topics. Even with only two students it's challenging to manage.

charles_f 5y ago

I liked the article ; one additional lesson I got from it is that you should not change your writing paradigm mid post. The first few bullets are things that he's disproving. Then they're things he concluded. I had to read again to understand he changed his writing

throwawayboise 5y ago

> The interactive manager plans backward from where he wants to be ideally, right now, not forward to where he wants to be in the future. I'm having trouble understanding this point. Is he saying the interactive manager looks backwards at what he might have done differently in the past, to be in a better place today? Would a better term for this be a "retrospective manager"? Or does this mean something else?

dminor 5y ago
I think he's saying the interactive manager doesn't guess what the future will be and plot a course for success in that future, but rather asks what would be ideal right now and plots a course to achieve that ideal.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
There was a recent Chess topic[0] that should help explain better. Basically all the engines in Chess start with the present position, and try to look into the future move by move. To be able to find the winning position like that is almost impossible for the position they were looking at. And yet, if you give the idea to an average Chess player, they will work out how to get a Checkmate. They will do so by finding Mate, then working back on how to get the board to that state. They will find the winning position when they reach the current state. He's simply taken this idea and generalized it further to more than Chess. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27188854
brody_hamer 5y ago
I’ve heard this put another way, when someone asked me: “what did the ideal version of yourself do differently today?” Which I found to be a dramatically different, and dramatically easier question to answer than something like “where do you want to be in 5 years?” I found it help me shift away from trying to make predictions, and towards making healthy, productive (not self-sabotaging), well-rounded decisions with obvious long term benefits.
- RHSman2 5y ago
  Brilliant

kqr2 5y ago

The Six Revelations from the article: Improving the performance of the parts of a system taken separately will not necessarily improve the performance of the whole; in fact, it may harm the whole. Problems are not disciplinary in nature but are holistic. The best thing that can be done to a problem is not to solve it but to dissolve it. The healthcare system of the United States is not a healthcare system; it is a sickness and disability-care system. The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. The principal function of most corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, but to maximize the standard of living and quality of work life of those who manage the corporation.

bsder 5y ago
> The educational system is not dedicated to produce learning by students, but teaching by teachers—and teaching is a major obstruction to learning. 1) The education system is designed to corral children for working hours so their parents can be cogs in the machine. 2) The education system is designed to produce a minimum competence so that the students can eventually become cogs in the machine. At no point was the public education system designed for anything significantly different from "average". Any effective excursions from average are a result of some exceptional teacher bucking the system rather than being helped by it.
- jmcqk6 5y ago
  People keep using the phrase "the education system is designed", but it really wasn't. People who say this really have no idea about the history of public education in this country, nor it's ongoing operation. The system has been a tool used by some to advance their own selfish goals, but it's hard to say things about the system as a whole that is is actually honestly applicable across the entire system. And it's even more complicated by the grudges people hold against the terrible teachers they had. it's understandable. Teachers hold important positions of authority in our most vulnerable and developing years. When they do not do what's best for us, it's a massive betrayal, and I can see why many would hold onto that and allow that to shape their entire view of the system. But it is an extremely skewed view.

mrfredward 5y ago

Somewhat buried, but this my favorite takeaway >Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems. Since mistakes are a no-no in most corporations, and the only mistakes identified and measured are ones involving doing something that should not have been done, the best strategy for managers is to do as little as possible. No wonder managerial paralysis prevails in American organizations. I've seen bright forward thinking leaders who delivered results get canned when one reasonable bet doesn't pay off, but mostly I've watched decision-makers stall when action is badly needed. This explains very succinctly what is wrong with so many places I've worked.

tomnipotent 5y ago
> but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems Except for actual accountants, for whom I can attest certainly do hunt down omissions. Especially when it's not your money you're spending.

rawgabbit 5y ago

Here is a PDF version of the article. Apparently its from a 1999 speech given at Villanova. https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501pk.pdf https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/100501...

bjterry 5y ago

I have been thinking a lot about Systems Thinking recently. Will Larson writes in An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management that it's one of the most useful general tools he's discovered for approaching management problems. That inspired me to read Donella Meadows Thing in Systems, but even after reading that, I'm not sure how to apply it to engineering organizations. It's only tangential to this topic, but if anyone has a good course or book that works through examples which can be transferred to managing engineering teams or organizations, I'd be grateful. When I read most systems thinking materials I get the sense that they are mostly focused on civilization-level problems like global warming, rather than on ways that I can individually use it to understand and make changes within my more prosaic scope. I also have a little bit of the feeling that the emperor has no clothes, since in spite of all their ideas, I can't find any major company that has successfully transformed an industry based on systems thinking, nor can I find any major social ill that has been solved through the application of systems thinking. If anyone has any concrete cases of those, I'd also be interested. I have a blog post working on applying Donella Meadows' Leverage Points to an engineering problem (incident retrospectives), but it's unsatisfying enough that I haven't figured out how to make it publishable.

gerbler 5y ago
Have you come across Business Dynamics by John Sterman? It's essentially Meadows approach applied to the business environment, including thinking about general organizational structure.
- bjterry 5y ago
  Thanks, this is a great recommendation based on the Amazon reviews!
michael1999 5y ago
Toyota and their production system comes to mind as the prototype of a system oriented company that transformed their industry. And Ford, in the original.
bmitc 5y ago