How to Safely Think in Systems
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How to Safely Think in Systems
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Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#2Solid read. Will sounds like a Farnam Street reader.
> Effective systems thinking comes from the tension between model and reality, without a healthy balance you’ll always lose the plot.
I’ve also heard this as “don’t confuse the map for the territory.”
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#3The authors number one recommended book is ~166 pages in total. I skimmed through and it's mostly pictures. The blog also contained no data. This is all completely fine, but it rubs me the wrong way when things are posed as scientific or rigorous, but are mostly subjective opinion pieces. I like to see what "thinking in systems" gets me with real evidence. I appreciate they took the time to create and share this though.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#4The authors number one recommended book is ~166 pages in total. I skimmed through and it's mostly pictures. The blog also contained no data. This is all completely fine, but it rubs me the wrong way when things are posed as scientific or rigorous, but are mostly subjective opinion pieces. I like to see what "thinking in systems" gets me with real evidence. I appreciate they took the time to create and share this thou…
Oh no. The book was only 160 pages? I whatever will you do?
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#5None of that has really anything to do with systems thinking. That models change, omit information and don't represent reality as such is true for any kind of thinking, systems or otherwise. That's just a truism.
At its core systems thinking is an antidote to reductionism. The essential feature of a system is that it is an indivisible whole and that its features are more than the sum of its parts. Systems lose their properties when taken apart into components, because their properties are the result of interactions between components, not the sum of the properties of components in isolation.
That insight produces the most important practical application of systems thinking, which is that systems always need to be designed from the ground up. People should never try to improve individual metrics, but only improve parts if it improves the whole. That's also what most of the examples in Maedow's book are about that's quoted in the piece.
It's also quite funny to bring up a transition to microservices in the piece in this context. I think microservice architectures are almost always the result of ignoring systems thinking lessons. People start to think in terms of the performance of each individual service, start to develop each service on its own terms, and start to ignore the fact that what matters is the interaction between services. It's exactly the kind of silo-ing that systems approaches try to avoid.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#6The iterative interactions of systems also occurs in computational fluid dynamics, with lots of clever techniques (some by von uNeumann) in a rigorously formalized mathematical domain - where it still isn't a "solved" problem.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#7None of that has really anything to do with systems thinking. That models change, omit information and don't represent reality as such is true for any kind of thinking, systems or otherwise. That's just a truism. At its core systems thinking is an antidote to reductionism. The essential feature of a system is that it is an indivisible whole and that its features are more than the sum of its parts. Systems lose their…
Yep, the Uber anecdote sounds more about hubris and inexperience than about systems design.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#8The authors number one recommended book is ~166 pages in total. I skimmed through and it's mostly pictures. The blog also contained no data. This is all completely fine, but it rubs me the wrong way when things are posed as scientific or rigorous, but are mostly subjective opinion pieces. I like to see what "thinking in systems" gets me with real evidence. I appreciate they took the time to create and share this thou…
Donatella Meadows created real impact wherever she went.
You might also want to look into real-life studies of efficiency and safety by people such as Deming, Weinberg, Womack, Leveson, Dekker, Shewhart, Hollnagel, Ward, etc. There plenty of evidence that it works, even if Meadow's more popular book isn't filled with references.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#9Some other commenters here seem to think this article is (or should have been?) an introduction to systems thinking, or an argument for using it.
The article is explicitly framed as some advice, based in experience, on avoiding common pitfalls with using explicit models in systems thinking. As such I think it is a nice read. It is also full of links to other interesting work by the author, not least of which is a tool to assist in system modeling (https://github.com/lethain/systems), and links to other similar tools I was unfamiliar with (https://insightmaker.com), which will make for some fine weekend reading and tinkering.
Re: How to Safely Think in Systems
#10The authors number one recommended book is ~166 pages in total. I skimmed through and it's mostly pictures. The blog also contained no data. This is all completely fine, but it rubs me the wrong way when things are posed as scientific or rigorous, but are mostly subjective opinion pieces. I like to see what "thinking in systems" gets me with real evidence. I appreciate they took the time to create and share this thou…
I read Thinking in Systems a few years ago, in part because Bill Gates recommended it. (I had seen it elsewhere too, probably on Hacker News.)
As I recall, there are problems with the book, because the author actually passed away before it was finished.
The biggest problem IMO is that it doesn't adequately address modeling error. It barely mentions it at all. It simply introduces models that were simulated on a computer, and talks about their consequences. And I remember there being a tenuous connection to the original research, which is notable because I believe the author's group did a lot of it.
So I would be interested in some other high level / overview books on the same subject. I'm not sure I got a lot out of this book. I think the main thesis was to focus on "points of leverage" when trying to change systems. I think it is valuable to hammer that point home, but it's hardly novel, and it wasn't justified with practice. I felt like it was too focused on simulations, and confused the simulations with reality.