This review is for the book club. Next month we’re reading A System for Writing by Bob Doto. Check out the future reads and join 500 other book lovers

Most of us interact with complex problems daily. If it’s not in your job, look around at the economic systems or political landscape we live within. Few things are as complex as these those systems. In Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows gives readers a primer on how to think about these complex problems more holistically by working to understand how the parts of a system interact to bring about the behaviour we see.

The Parts of Systems Thinking

When analyzing a problem, determine whether you’re dealing with a system or just a bunch of random stuff that happens to be grouped together currently¹. Can you identify the parts of the system and how they affect each other? Do inputs on one end change the behaviour you see as the output of the system? Does the behaviour of the system persist over time and under various circumstances?

That last question is the most beneficial part of systems thinking for solving your problems, how do things interact with each other outside of stated rhetoric, what is the behaviour²? It’s easy for businesses to say that they value the environment, but when tech companies disregard climate goals so they can stay in on the AI race their behaviour shows that they don’t care about climate goals. At least they don’t care about it more than keeping their bank accounts full.

In systems thinking there are two key types of loops to look at when you’re evaluating a system. First, the balanced feedback loop³. This is an input that balances out the system so that the same amount of something is entering the system as is leaving the system. You could think of this as an overflow valve on a rain barrel which helps ensure that the barrel doesn’t burst because it bleeds off the excess water in the system when it rains a lot.

Second is a runaway feedback loop, which once it gets past a tipping point, continues to runaway. Here you can think about a credit card used to fill in a financial gap, but then you need to pay interest and the gap gets bigger until you can’t make payments.

Both of these types of loops operate on the “stock” in question. For the rain barrel the stock is the water in the barrels and in the credit card example the stock is the available money to be spent in a given period. You can increase the load a system can handle by increasing the amount of stock in the system. Add more rain barrels to collect more water before the overflow is used to keep the system balanced.

Systems Thinking in Your Life

As readers and note-takers there is lots to gain from applying systems principles to our thinking.

As a practitioner of Zettelkasten systems thinking ties directly into my notes. Specifically systems thinking is concerned about how items are connected and interact with each other just like a good note practice is concerned with making new connections between existing notes you’ve already taken. This is where I see most people fall down, they focus only on the inflow of new ideas, without taking the time to work the notes they already have.

If you’ve been taking notes for a few months, you likely have a lot of notes and have a lot of connections that don’t yet exist because you haven’t spent the time needed to wade through your notes and think about them at more than a surface level. I’m sure that there are many connections I’ve missed in my 6000+ notes, but I too often focus on bringing in new ideas instead of taking the time to make more connections inside my existing notes.

Systems thinking also prioritises outflows of a stock. For the note-taker this is you using the information you’re taking in. How much are you creating⁴ compared to how much you’re consuming? Are you better served by watching 3 more YouTube videos, or reading an extra book in the month, or are you better served by sitting down and trying to write out your ideas so you can make sense of what you think and how the ideas you’ve collected connect?

To be sure, consuming is often easier than the hard job of creating. Refresh YouTube and see what new videos are recommended. Scroll through Reddit for interesting topics to read. Look for link suggestions on Mastodon or Micro.blog…all of these options take less mental bandwidth than thinking through your notes and expanding on the ideas.

You likely don’t need more input, you need more time for connections and more time creating.

Another interesting point for your life is looking at how systems fail. Resilient systems have a large number of feedback loops that help smooth out the bumps⁵. Often when changes in the system inputs don’t result in immediate changes in the output we figure that the resilient loops balancing the system aren’t needed and we can cut them away. When a resilient system is working it’s hard to see why it’s resilient⁶, but things collapse slowly then all at once.

Going back to the credit card example. You spend a bit extra and then make a payment on your card, but that payment money was borrowed from future earnings so you now have less to get by with in the next pay period. You can keep this up for a while, but many of us (including myself if my wife didn’t act as a check on my spending) end up spending more than we have and thus start paying interest, which digs the hole deeper. Our finances balanced themselves until they suddenly collapsed and the feedback loop turned into a negative reinforcement making it harder and harder to afford to live.

Many of us are interested in how to work better, but we don’t think very much about how to rest better. Productivity books offer life hacks, advice about how to get more done, or stories about what CEOs or famous writers do. But they say almost nothing about the role of rest in the lives or careers of creative, productive people. When they do mention rest, they tend to treat it as nothing more than a physical necessity or inconvenience. – Rest Location 65

We see the same thing happen when it comes to burnout. Coffee helps balance out lack of sleep by propping up our attention, but when you’re never getting enough sleep coffee doesn’t do enough and productivity drops. Society lionizes the workoholic for their 18 hour days and we fall into the trap of figuring out how to get more done trying to emulate some influencer that likely isn’t telling you the whole story. Instead of worrying about how to rest better or work on improving your own personal balancing loops so you can survive over the long haul.

Systems thinking can also help you challenge your own ideas as a key point systems thinkers ponder is what boundaries is their current thinking attached to⁷? When you look at a population group, do you divide it by religious groups or geographical boundaries, or is there some other way you should be grouping people that is outside your regular understanding? What steps are you going to take to examine the problem with different boundaries so you can see parts of the system that you are currently blind to?

The problem with solving problems is that we often jump to the first plausible definition of the problem⁸ and then without thinking further about other possible definitions we start trying to solve the problem. If we’ve only thought of the problem from within our mental boundaries without challenging them, we likely haven’t found the issue at hand and will waste a bunch of time solving an issue and implementing a solution to the incorrect problem. Then the behaviour won’t change how we expect, because our definition was wrong, and we’re surprised that our solution didn’t work.

You see this with rich countries transferring technology to poor countries thinking that it will solve the economic problems of a country only to be baffled that the technology didn’t work out as expected⁹. This is also seen as we give students access to more technology because STEM is awesome, when the growth in jobs is projected for health care and food preparation¹⁰. We get stuck thinking inside the boundaries that mere access to technology will lift all boats, when what is really needed is safe permanent space upon which to build a life¹¹.

Should you read Thinking in Systems?

Yes.

Adding this primer on systems thinking and developing questions to ask yourself based on systems thinking principles will help you deal with complex problems more effectively as you break out of the mental boundaries you have to define problems better and find more effective solutions.

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1. Thinking in Systems Pg 13 ↩︎
2. Thinking in Systems Pg 14 ↩︎
3. Thinking in Systems Pg 29 ↩︎
4. You don’t just have to create, how are you applying the knowledge gained in your life to improve the person that you are? ↩︎
5. Thinking in Systems Pg 76 ↩︎
6. Thinking in Systems Pg 77 ↩︎
7. Thinking in Systems Pg 98 ↩︎
8. Clear Thinking Pg 125, 126 ↩︎
9. Thinking in Systems Pg 101 ↩︎
10. The Promise of Access Pg 9 ↩︎
11. The Promise of Access Pg 12 ↩︎