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The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report on the exponential economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. Commissioned by the Club of Rome, the findings of the study were first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971. Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller - Ebook written by Donella Meadows. Read this book using Google Play Books app on your PC, android, iOS devices. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller.

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Book Preface

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

This book has been distilled out of the wisdom of thirty years of systems modeling and teaching carried out by dozens of creative people, most of them originally based at or influenced by the MIT System Dynamics group. Foremost among them is Jay Forrester, the founder of the group. My particular teachers (and students who have become my teachers) have been, in addition to Jay: Ed Roberts, Jack Pugh, Dennis Meadows, Hartmut Bossel, Barry Richmond, Peter Senge, John Sterman, and Peter Allen, but I have drawn here from the language, ideas, examples, quotes, books, and lore of a large intellectual community. I express my admiration and gratitude to all its members.

I also have drawn from thinkers in a variety of disciplines, who, as far as I know, never used a computer to simulate a system, but who are natural systems thinkers. They include Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly, Albert Einstein, Garrett Hardin, Václav Havel, Lewis Mumford, Gunnar Myrdal, E.F. Schumacher, a number of modern corporate executives, and many anonymous sources of ancient wisdom, from Native Americans to the Sufis of the Middle East. Strange bedfellows, but systems thinking transcends disciplines and cultures and, when it is done right, it overarches history as well.

Having spoken of transcendence, I need to acknowledge factionalism as well. Systems analysts use overarching concepts, but they have entirely human personalities, which means that they have formed many fractious schools of systems thought. I have used the language and symbols of system dynamics here, the school in which I was taught. And I present only the core of systems theory here, not the leading edge. I don’t deal with the most abstract theories and am interested in analysis only when I can see how it helps solve real problems. When the abstract end of systems theory does that, which I believe it will some day, another book will have to be written.

Therefore, you should be warned that this book, like all books, is biased and incomplete. There is much, much more to systems thinking than is presented here, for you to discover if you are interested. One of my purposes is to make you interested. Another of my purposes, the main one, is to give you a basic ability to understand and to deal with complex systems, even if your formal systems training begins and ends with this book.

—DONELLA MEADOWS, 1993

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

In 1993, Donella (Dana) Meadows completed a draft of the book you now hold. The manuscript was not published at the time, but circulated informally for years. Dana died quite unexpectedly in 2001—before she completed this book. In the years since her death, it became clear that her writings have continued to be useful to a wide range of readers. Dana was a scientist and writer, and one of the best communicators in the world of systems modeling.

In 1972, Dana was lead author of The Limits to Growth—a best-selling and widely translated book. The cautions she and her fellow authors issued then are recognized today as the most accurate warnings of how unsustainable patterns could, if unchecked, wreak havoc across the globe. That book made headlines around the world for its observations that continual growth in population and consumption could severely damage the ecosystems and social systems that support life on earth, and that a drive for limitless economic growth could eventually disrupt many local, regional, and global systems. The findings in that book and its updates are, once again, making front-page news as we reach peak oil, face the realities of climate change, and watch a world of 6.6 billion people deal with the devastating consequences of physical growth.

In short, Dana helped usher in the notion that we have to make a major shift in the way we view the world and its systems in order to correct our course. Today, it is widely accepted that systems thinking is a critical tool in addressing the many environmental, political, social, and economic challenges we face around the world. Systems, big or small, can behave in similar ways, and understanding those ways is perhaps our best hope for making lasting change on many levels. Dana was writing this book to bring that concept to a wider audience, and that is why I and my colleagues at the Sustainability Institute decided it was time to publish her manuscript posthumously.

Will another book really help the world and help you, the reader? I think so. Perhaps you are working in a company (or own a company) and are struggling to see how your business or organization can be part of a shift toward a better world. Or maybe you’re a policy maker who is seeing others “push back” against your good ideas and good intentions. Perhaps you’re a manager who has worked hard to fix some important problems in your company or community, only to see other challenges erupt in their wake. As one who advocates for changes in how a society (or a family) functions, what it values and protects, you may see years of progress easily undone in a few swift reactions. As a citizen of an increasingly global society, perhaps you are just plain frustrated with how hard it is to make a positive and lasting difference.

If so, I think that this book can help. Although one can find dozens of titles on “systems modeling” and “systems thinking,” there remains a clear need for an approachable and inspiring book about systems and us—why we find them at times so baffling and how we can better learn to manage and redesign them.

At the time that Dana was writing Thinking in Systems, she had recently completed the twenty-year update to Limits to Growth, titled Beyond the Limits. She was a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, was serving on the Committee on Research and Exploration for the National Geographic Society, and she was teaching about systems, environment, and ethics at Dartmouth College. In all aspects of her work, she was immersed in the events of the day. She understood those events to be the outward behavior of often complex systems.

Although Dana’s original manuscript has been edited and restructured, many of the examples you will find in this book are from her first draft in 1993. They may seem a bit dated to you, but in editing her work I chose to keep them because their teachings are as relevant now as they were then. The early 1990s were the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and great shifts in other socialist countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement was newly signed. Iraq’s army invaded Kuwait and then retreated, burning oil fields on the way out. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed. Labor leader Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland, and poet Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. The International Panel on Climate Change issued its first assessment report, concluding that “emissions from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and that this will enhance the greenhouse effect and result in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.” The UN held a conference in Rio de Janeiro on environment and development.

While traveling to meetings and conferences during this time, Dana read the International Herald Tribune and during a single week found many examples of systems in need of better management or complete redesign. She found them in the newspaper because they are all around us every day. Once you start to see the events of the day as parts of trends, and those trends as symptoms of underlying system structure, you will be able to consider new ways to manage and new ways to live in a world of complex systems. In publishing Dana’s manuscript, I hope to increase the ability of readers to understand and talk about the systems around them and to act for positive change.

I hope this small approachable introduction to systems and how we think about them will be a useful tool in a world that rapidly needs to shift behaviors arising from very complex systems. This is a simple book for and about a complex world. It is a book for those who want to shape a better future.

—DIANA WRIGHT, 2008

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Contents

A Note from the Author

A Note from the Editor

Download free donella meadows thinking in systems

Introduction: The Systems Lens

Part One: System Structure and Behavior

One. The Basics

Two. A Brief Visit to the Systems Zoo

Part Two: Systems and Us

Three. Why Systems Work So Well

Four. Why Systems Surprise Us

Five. System Traps . . . and Opportunities

Part Three: Creating Change—in Systems and in Our Philosophy

Six. Leverage Points—Places to Intervene in a System

Seven. Living in a World of Systems

Appendix

System Definitions: A Glossary

Summary of Systems Principles

Springing the System Traps

Places to Intervene in a System

Guidelines for Living in a World of Systems

Model Equations

Notes

Bibliography of Systems Resources

Editor’s Acknowledgments

About the Author

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A glossary of terms relating to systems theory.

A[edit]

Adaptive capacity: An important part of the resilience of systems in the face of a perturbation, helping to minimise loss of function in individual human, and collective social and biological systems.
Allopoiesis: The process whereby a system produces something other than the system itself.
Allostasis: The process of achieving stability, or homeostasis, through physiological or behavioral change.
Autopoiesis: The process by which a system regenerates itself through the self-reproduction of its own elements and of the network of interactions that characterize them. An autopoietic system renews, repairs, and replicates or reproduces itself in a flow of matter and energy. Note: from a strictly Maturanian point of view, autopoiesis is an essential property of biological/living systems.

B[edit]

Black box: A technical term for a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics.
Boundaries: The parametric conditions, often vague, always subjectively stipulated, that delimit and define a system and set it apart from its environment.

C[edit]

Cascading failure: Failure in a system of interconnected parts, where the service provided depends on the operation of a preceding part, and the failure of a preceding part can trigger the failure of successive parts.
Closed system: A system which can exchange energy (as heat or work), but not matter, with its surroundings.
Complexity: A complex system is characterised by components that interact in multiple ways and follow local rules. A complicated system is characterised by its layers.
Culture: The result of individual learning processes that distinguish one social group of higher animals from another. In humans culture is the set of interrelated concepts, products and activities through which humans rahil group 5036 themselves, interact with each other, and become aware of themselves and the world around them.

D[edit]

Development: The process of liberating a system from its previous set of limiting conditions. It is an amelioration of conditions or quality.
Dissipative structure: A term invented by Ilya Prigogine to describe complex chemical structures undergoing the process of chemical change through the dissipation of entropy into their environment, and the corresponding importation of 'negentropy' from their environment. Also known as syntropic systems.

E[edit]

Embeddedness: A state in which one system is nested in another system.
Emergence: The appearance of novel characteristics exhibited on the level of the whole ensemble, but not by the components in isolation.
Enantiostasis: The ability of an open system, especially a living organism, to stabilize and conserve function in spite of an unstable environment.
Entanglement: A state in which the manner of being, or form of existence, of one system is inextricably tied to that of another system or set of systems.
Entropy: In physics, entropy is a measure of energy that is expended in a physical system but does no useful work, and tends to decrease the organizational order of the system.
Environment: The context within which a system exists. It is composed of all things that are external to the system, and it includes everything that may affect the system, and may be affected by it at any given time.
Equifinality: In open systems, the principle that the same final state can be reached from different initial conditions, or in different ways.^[1]
Evolution: A tendency toward greater structural complexity, ecological and/or organizational simplicity, more efficient modes of operation, greater dynamic harmony, etc. As a cosmic process, it is not limited to the domain of biological phenomena, but extends to include all aspects of change in open dynamic systems with a throughput of information and energy.
Evolutionary systems: A type of system which reproduces with mutation.

F[edit]

Feedback: A functional monitoring signal obtained from a given dynamic and continuous system. A feedback function only makes sense if this monitoring signal is looped back into an eventual control structure within a system and compared with a known desirable state. The difference between the feedback monitoring signal and the desirable state of the system gives the notion of error. The amount of error can guide corrective actions in the system that can bring the system back to the desirable state.

H[edit]

Heterarchy: An ordering of things in which there is no single peak or leading element, and in which the element that is dominant at a given time depends on the total situation. The term is often used in contrast to hierarchy, i.e. a vertical arrangement of entities (systems and their subsystems), usually ordered from the top downwards rather than from the bottom upwards.
Holarchy: A concept invented by Arthur Koestler to describe behavior that is partly a function of individual nature and partly a function of the nature of the embedding system, generally operating in a bottom upwards fashion.
Holism: A non-reductionist descriptive and investigative strategy for generating explanatory principles of whole systems. Attention is focused on the emergent properties of the whole rather than on the reductionist behavior of the isolated parts.
Holon (philosophy): A whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system.
Homeorhesis: A concept encompassing dynamical systems which return to a trajectory, as opposed to systems which return to a particular state, which is termed homeostasis.
Homeostasis: The property of either an open system or a closed system (especially a living organism) which regulates its internal environment so as to maintain a stable, constant condition.
Human activity systems: Designed social systems organized for a purpose, which they attain by carrying out specific functions.

I[edit]

Isolated system: A system in which the total energy-mass is conserved without any external exchange happening.

L[edit]

Lowerarchy: A specific type of hierarchy involving a 'bottom up' arrangement of entities such that the few are influenced by the many.

M[edit]

Metastability: The ability of a non-equilibrium state to persist for some period of time.
Model building: A disciplined inquiry by which a conceptual (abstract) representation of a system is constructed or a representation of expected outcomes/output is portrayed.

O[edit]

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Open System Model (basics)

Open system: A state and characteristics of that state in which a system continuously interacts with its environment. Open systems are those that maintain their state and exhibit the characteristics of openness previously mentioned.
Structure–organization–process: See Structure–organization–process for various definitions.

P[edit]

Process: A naturally occurring or designed sequence of actions of an agent or changes of properties or attributes of an object or system.
Process model: An organized arrangement of systems concepts and principles that portray the behavior of a system through time. Its metaphor is the 'motion-picture' of 'movie' of the system.
Structure–organization–process: See Structure–organization–process for various definitions.

R[edit]

Reductionism: One kind of scientific orientation that seeks to understand phenomena by a) breaking them down into their smallest possible parts (a process known as analytic reductionism), or conversely b) conflating them to a one-dimensional totality (a process known as holistic reductionism).

S[edit]

Self-organization: A process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.
Self-organizing systems: Systems that typically (though not always) display emergent properties.
Steady state: A state in which the variables (called state variables) which define the behavior of a system or a process are unchanging in time. In chemistry, it is a more general situation than dynamic equilibrium. If a system is in steady state then the recently observed behaviour of the system will continue into the future. In stochastic systems, the probabilities that various states will be repeated will remain constant.
Strong emergence: A type of emergence in which the emergent property is irreducible to its individual constituents.
Structure–organization–process: See Structure–organization–process for various definitions.
Subsystem: A major component of a system. It is made up of two or more interacting and interdependent components. Subsystems of a system interact in order to attain their own purpose(s) and the purpose(s) of the system in which they are embedded.
Suprasystem: The entity that is composed of a number of component systems organized in interacting relationships in order to serve their embedding suprasystem.
Sustainability: The ability of a system to maintain itself with no loss of function for extended periods of time. In human terms it is an ideal of creative and responsible stewardship of resources—human, natural, and financial—to generate stakeholder value while contributing to the well-being of current and future generations of all beings.
Synchrony or synchronicity: In engineering; concurrence of periods and/or phases; simultaneity of events or motions: contemporaneous occurrences. In evolutionary systems thinking; a fortunate coincidence of phenomenon and/or of events.
Synergy: The process by which a system generates emergent properties resulting in the condition in which a system may be considered more than the sum of its parts, or equal to the sum of its parts plus their relationships.
Syntony: In evolutionary systems thinking, evolutionary consonance, the occurrence and persistence of an evolutionarily tuned dynamic regime, a purposeful creative aligning and tuning with the evolutionary flows of one's milieu. In traditional radio engineering, a condition in which two oscillators have the same resonant frequency.
Syntropy: The process of negentropy-importation. A syntropic system is a dissipative structure.
Systems design: A decision-oriented disciplined inquiry that aims at the construction of a model that is an abstract representation of a future system.
Soft systems methodology: A systemic approach for tackling real-world problematic situations, an approach which provides a problem-structuring framework for users to deal with the kind of messy problem situations that lack a formal problem definition.

W[edit]

Weak emergence: A type of emergence in which the emergent property is reducible to its individual constituents.
White-box testing: A technical term for a device or system analyzed or tested based on knowledge of its internal structure (compare to Black box).
Wholeness: In reference to systems, the condition in which systems are seen to be structurally divisible, but functionally indivisible wholes with emergent properties.

References[edit]