Thread by @startuployalist

Book thread: “Thinking in Systems: A Primer” by Donella H. Meadows. 📚👇

Systems are manipulable, suppressing and surfacing some hidden potential of behavior latent within its structure:

Meadows emphasizes noticing the relationship between the structure and behavior to see how systems work.

What I found a bit surprising (but shouldn’t have): not only is systems thinking useful for managing and adapting, but it offers a lens into—choices

The part about losing market share as more of a reflection of a company’s own policies reminds me of Thiel’s exhortation to be unique, instead of following the pied piper of competitive mimesis:

Here, Meadows points out how the linear, logical order, or structure of a sentence is insufficient when discussing systems whose workings occur all at once.

Further, she writes that elucidating systems will require accommodating language plus other types of representations:

I *love* this foreshadowing roadmap-summary. Gives the reader a clear understanding of what to read-for, cueing a baseline recall around these topics, freeing up the mind to come up with inferences and connections:

1. parts
2. effect of parts
3. parts together, different effect
4. persistent effect/behavior over time, in different contexts

These two paragraphs beautifully trace hints of interconnection in a tree’s system as well as its communication: