Inventing Elephants

Most books and movies can be boiled down to one of a handful of plots. The surprises and excitement lie in the details and in the way the story unfolds.

Destructive systems are similarly predictable, following familiar story lines across different situations, industries, and environments on both large and small scales. Donella Meadows describes 8 of the most common archetypes in Thinking in Systems and caps off each story with a way to get out of the trap set by the plot.

These are:

• Policy Resistance - tug of war and we all fall down
  
• The Tragedy of the Commons - overuse via self-interest
  
• Drift to Low Performance -continually lowering your expectations
  
• Escalation - she poked me so I'll poke her harder
• Success to the Successful - I won, so now I have money to help me win next time
• Shifting the Burden to the Intervenor - You're not helping me enough
• Rule Beating - It's what you said, but doesn't get to where you meant
• Seeking the Wrong Goal - the system did exactly what you asked, oops

But my favorite is Success to the Successful, because it hardly seems like a trap.

I mean, if you do well at something, maybe make some money, then it makes sense that you should be able to invest what you earned into doing even better at the next thing. It's how you grow a business or get better at your hobbies.

But it's a trap when there is a scarcity of resources, perhaps even if that scarcity is only mental. Each time the successful person gets a little more and gets a little better it becomes that much harder for the unsuccessful person to catch up to them. It happens in the game of Monopoly, where the first person who's able to start charging more and higher rents starts pulling ahead.

When we stay in one mode of thinking, there is scarcity on a larger scale. Poor children in poor areas end up with poor education, making it harder for them to reach a higher standard of living. Land is owned unevenly. Businesses tend to grow larger and are eventually restrained only by anti-trust laws.

When the poor get poorer it's sad from a moral point of view and also poses a danger that those societies or individuals will eventually get frustrated enough in their hopelessness to violently reset the game. Meadows recommends a couple more peaceful ways to level the playing field, such as taxation and gift-giving traditions.

One she didn't bring up is changing the rules. That's why this archetype attracted me. It reminded me of the set-up for disruptive innovations and how tiny businesses can overtake established ones and become wildly successful, sometimes. They changed the game and somehow increased the number of resources available in a way that wasn't directly intended to limit the wealth of the other players. Expanding the concept outside of the business world is a little more complex, but I would expect that changing the way we think still has the potential to provide other ways out of this trap by fostering abundance instead of scarcity.

All eight archetypes are found in Chapter Five: System Traps ... and Opportunities. This post is the seventh in a series that discusses the concepts in Thinking in Systems.  Also read 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

Update on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 09:17PM by Beth Robinson

For another take on Success to the Successful read Joanne Egner's post over on Making Connections, the isee systems blog (a company that produces systems thinking software). They also published a step by step visual tutorial mapping out the causal loop diagram clearly.