systems thinking
- "system" is a very overloaded word. What it means in the context of "systems thinking" or General Systems Theory is something like this:
- > A system is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.
- > The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside sources. But the system's responses to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.
- > The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!
- — Donella Meadows
13 linked references
Pointing at the shift / mindset pairs / ways of being
- Core idea in systems thinking, discussed in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, among other places.
Podcast summaries
- 1:10:42 - 1:19:58 - Explaining how the hemispheres work using information processing/computation as a metaphor left hemisphere Categories, AI & Left Hemisphere it's the left hemisphere's job to have blindspots right hemisphere complexity systems thinking Donella Meadows resources for systems thinking
psychopaths
- Also, perspective-taking, when understood in terms of systems thinking, is an orthogonal axis from emotional empathy.
- Learning perspective-taking in this sense is high-priority for everyone, regardless of sociopathy, as it yields people being able to make decisions that care better for the larger systems they are participants within and rely on for their survival & thrival.
Change doesn't just happen
- This can be understood as fundamentally a failure to apply systems thinking
January 9th, 2021
- Someone at a Goal-Crafting Intensive asked me for systems thinking reading recommendations
- Oh man, Thinking in Systems would have been my first reco
- if you want to go more into the spiritual elements, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory is an amazing book (and one that Sarah recommended to me)
- if you want to go into more pragmatic/business elements, The Fifth Discipline is a great one, and also just a great general intro to perspective-taking and "there is no blame" and other deep systems thinking principles
- for a kind of snarky take on how people get confused about how complex systems work: Systemantics: The Systems Bible
- For a more technical orientation, Gerald M. Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking is great
- oh, also Seeing Systems or Context Context Context by Barry Oshry
panic
- also panic as a concept in systems thinking
- something about
August 23rd, 2020
- limitations of scientific paradigms and need for systems thinking
- averagerianism became popular in part because it works on planetary bodies. it doesn't work for complex systems with many many dimensions and control systems
- something about systems thinking
- Donella Meadows?
- Fifth Discipline?
- Mutual Causality
July 26th, 2020
- For making systems diagrams
- Nicky Case's Loopy for really simple ones
- Insight Maker for anything more complex
- this article of theirs talks about the value of having not just causal diagrams but stock & flow diagrams to really illustrate what's happening and whether a limit is hard vs soft, etc
Leave Nothing Out
- The style of call & response has an almost hymn-like quality, which has me inspired to create a sort of #systems thinking hymnal.
What is Blame?
- Lately, after staring a bunch at systems thinking, I've started to have some sense of an answer to this question. It remains to be seen to what extent I can put that answer into words.
Hemisphere Dharma
- & systems thinking more generally
Reality is alive: don't carve it
- The rebuttal comes from a #systems thinking perspective. At the moment this page is mostly a collection of sources.