Thinking in Systems: International BestsellerThe classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes
"Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins
In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions. |
From inside the book
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... 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 ...
... how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns. As our world continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems thinking Introduction: The Systems Lens |
International Bestseller Donella Meadows Diana Wright. continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems thinking will help us manage, adapt, and see the wide range of choices we have before us. It is a way of thinking that ...
... becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine. According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win ...
... become a little more complete. At a time when the world is more messy, more crowded, more interconnected, more interdependent, and more rapidly changing than ever before, the more ways of seeing, the better. The systems-thinking lens ...
Contents
11 | |
35 | |
Three Why Systems Work So Well | 75 |
five System Traps and Opportunities | 111 |
Six Leverage PointsPlaces to Intervene in a System | 145 |
Seven Living in a World of Systems | 166 |
Appendix | 187 |
Notes | 204 |