BAFRO - Seminar 7 - Meadows: living in a world of systems

- They cant be controlled, but can be designed and redesigned.
- They can't surge forward with certainty into a world full of surprised, but can expect surprises and learn from them.
- We can't impose our will on a system, but can listen to what the system tells us and learn from it.

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1. Get the beat of the system.
2. Expose your mental models to the light of day.
3. Honor, respect and distribute information.
4. Use language and care and enrich it with system concepts.
5. Pay attention to what is important.
6. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
7. Go for the good of the whole.
8. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
9. Locate responsibility within the sytem.
10. Stay humble, stay a learner.
11. Celebrate complexity.
12. Expand time horizons.
13. Defy the disciplines.
14. Expand the boundary of caring.
15. Don't erode the goal of goodness.

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We have a common and distracting tendency to define a problem not by the system's actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. People leap to solutions in 'predict, control or impose your will', without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it's doing it.

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- We have to put everyone of our assumptions about the system out where others can see them, so they no longer slide around.
- Mental flexibility (=the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure) is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.
- It makes them as rigorous as possible, testing them against the evidence and being willing to scuttle them if they are no longer supported is nothing more than practicing the scientific method.

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Decision makers can't respond to information they don't have, can't respond accurately to information that is inaccurate and can't respond in a timely way that is late.

Most of what goes wrong in system is because of biases, being late or missing information.

So: give information, information is power.

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- Our information streams are composed primarily of language.
- Our mental models are mostly verbal.
- Honoring information is avoiding language pollution and expanding our language so we can talk about complexity.

Steps in respecting language are:
1. Keeping language as concrete, meaningful and truthful as possible.
2. Enlarge language to make it consistent with out enlarged understanding of systems.

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Pretending that something doesn't exist if it is not quantifiable leads to faulty models.

Humans have been endowed not only with the ability to count but also with the ability to assess quality, be a quality detector.

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You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting feedback system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy.

It is easier, more effective and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system.

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