Reading · General
Thinking in Systems · Donella Meadows
A system's behaviour comes from its structure, and the points where an intervention changes something are rarely the most visible ones.
The idea
Meadows explains the behaviour of a system through its stocks, its flows, its feedback loops and its delays. And she ranks the points of intervention: changing a parameter barely moves anything, whereas changing the information that circulates, the rules or the goals moves a great deal more.
Why it matters to us
We design systems that are installed inside organisations that were already working. The initial request is almost always a parameter — a threshold, a frequency, a better model — and the improvement is almost always in changing what information reaches whom, and when.
What we question
The hierarchy of leverage points is useful for thinking and hard to apply: the high points are precisely the ones a company cannot touch within a project. Meadows acknowledges this and does not resolve it, and we work inside that constraint every day.
What changed
We start projects by asking what information exists today, with what delay it arrives and who can act on it, before talking about models. That conversation has changed the scope of several projects in the first week.
What it connects to
It connects to the way we understand applied intelligence, to knowledge intelligence for complex projects, and to the system in practice on how to represent what a project does not yet know.