System Opportunities

Opportunities §

• To make effective use of a system, we must identify the structure that leads to the problem and guess where we can make a small but meaningful change.

• Remember that we want to aim for the right goals and Complex Systems often give counterintuitive results.

• We can examine the following leverage points which we can examine and experiment with. These are ordered in terms of increasing power and increasing difficulty.

  • Numbers - constants and parameters involved in the system
    • Changes in variables are rarely meaningful because they do not change the system behavior in a significant way.
    • Parameters become leverage points when they kick off stronger leverage points.
  • Buffers - the sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows
    • Systems can become more stable with increased buffers.
    • But, bigger buffers mean the system reacts too slowly or has increased upkeep cost.
    • Buffers are usually not easy to change.
  • Stock-and-flow-structures - Physical systems and their interactions
    • Like buffers, changing these physical structures is a slow, complex process.
    • The leverage comes in proper design and understanding of the limitations and usage of the design
  • Delays - the lengths of time relative to the rates of system changes
    • Delays are not often easily changeable.
    • It is usually easier to slow down the change rate so that inevitable feedback delays won’t cause so much trouble
    • Changes in delays can lead to unexpected consequences.
  • Balancing Feedback Loops - the strength of the feedbacks relative to the impacts they are trying to correct.
    • A complex system usually has numerous balancing feedback loops it can bring into play, so it can self-correct under different conditions and impacts
    • The strength of a balancing loop is dependent on a combination of
      • its parameters and links,
      • the accuracy and rapidity of monitoring,
      • the quickness and power of response
      • the directness and size of corrective flows.
    • The strength of the balancing loop should be proportional to the impacts being corrected.
  • Reinforcing feedback loops - The strength of the gain of driving loops
    • A complex system has few reinforcing loops since they make it unstable.
    • One powerful leverage point is to slow the growth of the reinforcing loop. It is often more powerful than the strength of balancing loops.
  • Information Flow - the structure of who does and does not have access to information.
    • Aim to introduce feedback to where it wasn’t before to where it should have been and in a way that is compelling for the agents in the system.
    • Often systems malfunction due to missing feedback.
  • Rules - incentives ,punishments, constraints
    • The rules of the system define its scope, boundaries and degrees of freedom.
    • Power over rules is real power. The rules for writing rules has even more powers. Whoever controls the rules has the power.
  • Self-Organization - the power to add, change or evolve system structure
    • Adding new physical structures to any lower level leverage points to change the system itself.
    • The rules of self-organization govern how, where, and what the system can add or remove from itself and under what conditions.
    • It offers a means for exploration and exploitation. It is a new stock which embodies the system’s potential.
  • Goals - the purpose or function of the system
    • Everything below the goal of the system conforms to the goal of the system.
    • Hence we must insist on setting the correct goals.
  • Paradigms - The mindset out of which the system arises.
    • The shared idea in the minds of society, its assumptions constitute society’s paradigm or implicit beliefs.
    • From the shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come goals which characterize systems.
    • Change the paradigm by pointing at its flaws. An active rather than a passive approach.
    • Modeling the systems serve to analyze current paradigms and to potentially change them.
  • Transcending Paradigms.
    • Stay flexible and attach to no paradigm. No paradigm is true. Every paradigm is limited.
    • If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose. If you have no idea where to get a purpose, you can listen to the universe.

Systems Thinking §

• Systems insights can raise more questions than answers. We can never fully understand the world.

• Systems are uncontrollable but they can be designed and redesigned.

• Get the Beat of the System - understand the system, how it works and how it has operated in the past. Look not just at static events but at the dynamic behaviors and trends of the system and how these came about based on its goals.

  • Understanding the behavior of the system lets you focus on the facts rather than theories or personal biases.

• Expose your mental models to the light of day - redraw your boundaries for the system. Understand when a paradigm shift or a restructuring is necessary. Update your models accordingly based on evidence. Experiment.

• Honor, Respect, and Distribute Information - modifying a system’s information flows change it significantly. Information is power.

• Use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts - Language is the way in which we conceptualize the world. Expanding our language also expands our models. ¹

  • Keep language as meaningful, concrete, and truthful as possible.
  • Enlarge language to make it consistent with an enlarged understanding of the systems.

• Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable - Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models.

• Make feedback policies for feedback systems - a dynamic system cannot be governed by a static policy. Design flexible policies that change depending on the system ²

• Go for the good of the whole ³ . Do not lower the standard of “good”

• Listen to the wisdom of the system ⁴. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

• Locate Responsibility in the System

  • As a system analyst look for ways the system creates its own behavior.
  • Intrinsic responsibility means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly to decision makers .

• Stay humble - Stay a learner.

• Celebrate complexity. The universe is a complex system. Encourage this complexity rather than simplifying it.

• Expand time horizons. Think more long-term rather than just short-term. Actions now affect the far future, and actions from the far past affect the present.

• Defy the disciplines - systems transcend disciplines. Be interdisciplinary and learn from many things. Expand your horizons.

• Expand the boundary of caring - the system is interconnected. Caring for one aspect cascades to the whole system.

• Don’t erode the goal of goodness - set appropriate standards. Prevent the system’s goals from eroding.

• Systems thinking can only tell us to do that. It can’t do it. We’re back to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap, but it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

Links §

• Meadows - Ch. 7 - 8

• System Archetypes - issues with incorrectly using the leverage points, and also ways to fix them.

• The Systems Thinker — Dancing with Systems by Meadows

Footnotes §

1. See the Theory of Linguistic relativity. ↩

2. Something akin to Reinforcement Learning ↩

3. See Pareto Optimality. ↩

4. In game theory terms, similar to the advice offered here. ↩