Living in a world of systems

I’ve just finished reading Donella Meadow’s seminal work ‘Thinking in Systems’. It’s excellent.

The book goes through systems principles in a thoughtful and concise way. I am now registering my decision to water plants and hoover the house as systems of information-feedback control. (I’m not sure this particular self-consciousness is enriching… I am confident other applications will prove more so.)

But the power of Meadows’ work extends beyond the technical systems framework. She undertakes a philosophical reckoning with the importance of human virtue.

Meadows finishes with a chapter called “Living in a world of systems”. It’s a reflective, moving counterpart to the conceptual framework which effectively integrates systems thinking into an understanding of human ethics.

She writes that systems thinking helps us understand many things we hadn’t understood before, but it doesn’t help us understand everything:

“Social systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. Changing them is not as simple as saying “now all change” or of trusting that he who knows the good shall do good…

We gave learned lectures on the structure of addiction and could not give up coffee… We warned about the traps of escalation and shifting the burden and then created them in our own marriages”

In other words, systems thinking might aid our understanding, but this does not grant us the ability to meaningfully intervene. Moreover, our inability to intervene can be confronting, especially where our incapacity originates in our own moral failings.

Self-organising, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. As Meadows says tongue-in-cheek, this is hard to take for “those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror”.

This is could be read as license to give up on change; it should be read only as a nudge towards humility and not as an excuse for apathy.

In praise of the goal of goodness

One of the system traps identified in the book is “drift to low performance”, in which a balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The desired state of the system is influenced by the perceived state. The lower this perceived state is, the lower the desired state and the less corrective action is taken.

This is what explains how the presence of litter is a factor which contributes to future littering in an area, or how the idea of a ‘failing school’ can inhibit improvement. This phenomenon is also called “eroding goals”.

The antidotes is to keep standards absolute. And for this reason, the ending of the entire book is a section entitled “don’t erode the goal of goodness“.

We make a mistake when we abdicate our [moral] responsibility over systems.

Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned.

Meadows writes:

“Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity – our rationality, intuition, compassion, vision, morality.”

Isn’t that wonderful?

We can’t impose our will on systems, but we can shape them. A system’s properties works together with our values. It is possible to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

You may of course be wondering what exactly “goodness” means. Meadows doesn’t take a firm view on this, but at one point in the book she quotes Aldo Leopold:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Rich in spirit

What resonates most deeply with me in Meadows’ work is her unwavering faith in human capacity. Near the book’s conclusion, she quotes Joseph Wood Krutch, who observes that modern humans, despite unprecedented technical capabilities, have “never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is.” We have become, in his words, “poor in spirit.”

This poverty isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice, or rather a series of small choices that gradually erode our expectations of ourselves and each other. When we witness declining standards around us we face the temptation to adjust our own expectations downward, to accept the drift to low performance as inevitable.

Meadows challenges us to resist this drift. She reminds us that while systems are complex and often beyond our control, we need not surrender to cynicism or fatalism. The very act of maintaining high standards is itself a powerful intervention.

Perhaps this is why Meadows insists that living successfully in a world of systems requires “our full humanity.” Systems thinking isn’t just about understanding feedback loops and leverage points; it’s an invitation to step into the power of our own moral imagination.

I spoke with a friend this week who told me he and his wife connected in part because they both shared the conviction that they wanted ‘to do more with their lives than just exist.’ I thought that was a lovely value to share, and I think Meadows would approve. Here are two people refusing to erode their goals for what life could be.

I’m always conscious that talking about goodness and moral imagination ends up sounding really serious. I can’t help thinking that if we could somehow make virtue a bit cooler, it would be easier to get the world working better for everyone. Meadows didn’t offer solutions for this particular systems challenge, but at least she’s provided a new branding option: the next time someone accuses me of being overly idealistic, I’ll simply tell them that I’m “practicing advanced systems thinking”!