Inventing Elephants

Screechy microphone noises and comments from your manager are not what Donella Meadows has in mind when she talks about how system thinkers can see feedback everywhere.

Feedback is one part of the dynamic behavior of a system.

Reinforcing Loop

It is like an interest rate, when the increase from one month means that there's more in your bank account, or on your credit card balance, to increase the next month. So the money, or debt, grows more in the tenth month than it did in the first month.

Balancing Loop

It is like a cup of coffee on a cool day that responds to the temperature by cooling down or an iced mocha on a hot day that responds to the temperature by warming up. But the closer the temperature of the liquid is to the temperature of the air, the less it cools or warms in the next minute.

A system can cause its own behavior.

What this means to me, which is not emphasized in the book until later chapters, is that it also gives us a point where we can try to impact that behavior. We can slow down the transfer of heat by using a well-insulated cup or change the interest rate on the bank account. The problem here is that aspect of delay

Meadows highlights that it also means that when A causes B, B could be causing changes in A at the same time. In real life different loops interact and compete with each other in a complex web and the book moves next into some common relationships seen in different systems.

This post is the third in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Read the book to see her diagrams, graphs, and capture more of the subtleties of the concepts. Also reach my other posts:

1. Book Review: Thinking in Systems
2. What is a System?
3. Feedback Entangles How Fast with How Much
4. Delays and Disasters at the Zoo
5. Effective Systems Beyond Our Control
6. Why Systems Surprise Us
7. The Same Story Retold
8. Four Approaches to Changing Systems
9. Dancing with Living Systems