MEADOWS
DONELLA MEADOWS: “Being human, I am blessed with remarkable organs of perception that bring millions of messages from the world—and I can be so dazzled by my own constant barrage of experience that I take it for the whole world. But I’ve learned, the hard way, that my experience isn’t the world. It’s only a tiny sample.
“So I need other people, who have sampled other parts of the world. Together we can make a more complete picture. I need to report my piece of reality honestly, listen to others, and to remember that the bit of truth I know is not anywhere near all the truth there is.
“There’s a part of me—it feels as if it’s buried deep—that shines. It literally shines, or so it seems to me, with a warm and steady glow. It’s where my deepest wisdom and best instincts come from. That part of me seems, in a way I can’t explain (and I was trained as a scientist; I squirm at things I can’t explain), to be simultaneously inside me and beyond me. It’s connected to the whole universe. It’s ancient, loving, noble. I think it’s what other people mean when they use words like “conscience” or “soul” or “God.”
“Most of the time I keep it well buried under a sludge of busyness, complaints, schemes, worries, fantasies, and fears...we live in cultures, created collectively by ourselves, that can encourage sludge—or encourage ready access to the inner shining.
“Since I experience my culture and myself shaping each other in a dance, I find myself unable to put blame or credit for human actions fully on either the individual or the culture. I know from the nightly news that when dictators put guns in the hands of young men and women and tell them to shoot certain kinds of persons, a lot of those young women and young men—but not all—will shoot. If their culture had encouraged them from birth to be guided by their own internal nobility, most of them—but not all—would not shoot. I think so anyway. I’ve never known a culture like that.
“The culture I live in powerfully encourages sludge and shooting. It does not lead people to experience the shining place inside themselves. My sorrow about this is so deep that I can’t begin to express it. I see the news, the ads, the politics, the pop songs, the malls, the movies, the dope, the blight, the organized injustice, and I weep inside…
“I weep for the culture, but when I think about who I am, who we all are, we humans, I have to laugh—laugh as I would laugh at a child or a puppy, humbling and self-centered, a still-unrealized being, but wonderfully endearing, infinitely lovable, full of potential.”
Dancing with systems: 14 clues to systems wisdom that apply to everyday life
After publication of Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows moved from MIT to Dartmouth to teach and conduct research as a systems analyst. She died while working on a book manuscript that includes a diagnosis and prescription for humankind’s out of balance lifestyle.
The manuscript titled Thinking in Systems is scheduled to be published by the Sustainability Institute which she founded. Following is an excerpt from the manuscript that attempts to correct a mistaken impression many people have about systems thinking.
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here in systems analysis, in the interconnection and complication in the power of the computer; here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to predication and control.
I assumed that at first, too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mind-play. It was going to Make Systems Work.
But self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way… Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty….
For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?
Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however—waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being… We can’t impose our will upon a system. WE can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
“We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than an ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”
Donella Meadows the scientist suggests 14 clues to what she calls systems wisdom that applies to all of life. For anyone concerned with the welfare of our children in the future, the following summary of each clue is worth meditating on:
ONE: GET THE BEAT
Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat…learn its history. Keep good records…focus on facts, not theories…
TWO: LISTEN TO THE WISDOM OF THE SYSTEM
Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Don’t be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there
THREE: EXPOSE YOUR MENTAL MODELS TO THE OPEN AIR
Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption with which you might have confused your own identity.
FOUR: STAY HUMBLE, STAY A LEARNER
Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring-out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know…
The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error… “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes.
FIVE: HONOR AND PROTECT INFORMATION
A decision-maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information.
SIX: LOCATE RESPONSIBILITY IN THE SYSTEM
Look for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down the incidences of infectious disease). But sometimes they can’t. And sometimes blaming or trying to control outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system.
SEVEN: MAKE FEEDBACK POLICIES FOR FEEDBACK SYSTEMS
President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback.
He suggested at a time when oil prices were soaring, that there should be a tax on gasoline proportional to the fraction of U.S. oil consumption that had to be imported. If imports continued to rise the tax would rise, until it suppressed demand and brought forth substitutes and reduced imports. If imports fell to zero, the tax would fall to zero.
The tax never got passed.
EIGHT: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT IS IMPORTANT, NOT JUST WHAT IS QUANTIFIABLE
Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live…Don’t be stopped by the ‘if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it’ ploy
NINE: GO FOR THE GOOD OF THE WHOLE
Don’t marginalize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. As Kenneth Boulding once said, don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not…
It helps to remember that the parts of a system cannot survive without the whole. The long-term interests of your liver required the long-term health of you body, the long-term interests of sawmills require the long-term health of forests.
TEN: EXPAND TIME HORIZONS
The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. The time horizon of most families still extends farther than that—through the lifetimes of children or grandchildren. Many North American cultures actively spoke of and considered in their decisions the effects upon the seventh generation to come. The longer the operant time horizon, the better the chances for survival…
ELEVEN: EXPAND THOUGHT HORIZONS
Defy disciplines, In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines. To understand that system, you have to be able to learn from—while not being limited by—economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians…
TWELVE: EXPAND THE BOUNDARY OF CARING
Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail…or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.
As with everything else about systems, most people already know the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe what they know.
THIRTEEN: CELEBRATE COMPLEXITY
Let’s face it, the Universe is mess. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematical neat equlibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it work.
There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions. To uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery; (that part of us) designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces.
Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the macroscopic to the microscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels…all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us.
FOURTEEN: HOLD FAST TO THE GOAL OF GOODNESS
Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical… After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are Not News. They are exceptions…
And so expectations are lowered. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly, amoral or immoral and are not held to account…
We know what to do about eroding goals… Don’t weight the bad news more heavily than the good. And so we are brought to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap. But it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit.
I like to imagine Donella Meadows, Robert A. F. Thurman, and David Korten as human prototype Prokaryotes trying to communicate to the rest of their pioneer species:
Hey guys, we can’t keep doing things the way we’re doing them now. We’re gunking up the whole system. We’ve got a crisis on our hands. Everything we need to know to solve it is spelled out for us. This is no time for games. Help us get the word out fast.
In 1972 the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth: Confronting Global Collapse. Donella Meadows, a scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was lead author. Other MIT scientists participated in the research that confirmed Thurman’s critique. The gap between our inner knowing and science’s escalating powers to mess around with the environment was having disastrous consequences. Decades after Einstein’s prophetic warning, humans were further down the path toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Limits to Growth confirmed for humans what one-cell Prokaryotes and supernova mother stars learned billions of years ago. The law of limits is real. Any species that undermines the stability of the ecosystem on which its own existence depends will crash into that wall.