Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Will Larson referenced this book when I read “An Elegant Puzzle” about a year ago. Not long after that I picked up thinking in systems, a short book, and have spent the rest of the year reading it in short bursts.
The book leaves an impact it’s been on my mind for some time since, but also was somewhat hard going - not helped by a fairly flat audiobook narration. It strikes me as an excellent source text, but one where a talented journalist would do better to integrate it into a more accessible work.
It builds to its point through its own hand crafted jargon, we’re talking stocks, flows, feedback loops. Fairly accessible words with a depth of meaning here. One you can miss and will need to flick back across if your attention wanders for a second.
So that’s my excuse for taking a year to read a short book, but it’s worth it.
I’m still digesting, and as yet am very unsure what to do with these ideas. Right now I feel they’ll be valuable, but the proof will need to come in finding a way to use them.
There is something powerful though about ceasing to see organisations, identities or nouns around me as fixed things and instead as digestible systems. Often when I’ve headed down this path before you reach a stage where all feels like all melts into air and there’s no longer anything clear to hold onto. However Meadows wants to do something more empirical here, things that feel more applicable in daily work.
It leads me to try and think about influences and what sustains an outcome, more than a belief that something just is - and produces that outcome as a natural product. It helps me digest those influences into flows and rates of change, or look for counterposing forces that sustain a pool of results and hide torrents below calm surfaces.
The book feels valuable, but also leaves me hungry for something more. I both want to know something of how to apply this and to what ends, something I think I’ll turn to the lineage of cybernetics to answer - but also a wider set of philosophical questions behind this. For that I think I’ll need to go earlier, back to the 1900s when relativity is rocking the world and many schools seem to be wrestling with the meaning behind these changes. From dialectics and historical materialism, to process philosophy and logical positivism - I come away from this book hungry to better understand the structure of flow, and also its potential application.
After "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" I read: Designing Freedom
Before "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" I read: Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed