Thinking In Systems

Overall

Changing a symptom without addressing the underlying system is not great

Basic Understanding of Systems

• System is made up of, elements, connections and purpose(s) and it's more than the sun of it's parts
• Purposes are deduced from behavior not what they say
• Sub systems and their purposes often come in conflict with one another and the overall purpose
• Defined by connections and purpose, elements can and do change over time
• Stock (amount of stuff), flows (changes in amount of stock)
• Humans are worse at noticing flows and worse at noticing inflows and worstest at noticing outflows and their affects. New oil field means prolonged oil supply, energy efficiency break through also means prolonged energy supply
• Stocks usually change slowly (is a buffer)
• Inflow and outflows are independent

Loops

• Feedback loops, flows are adjusted because of changes in the size of the stock itself.

• Balancing loop, (hot coffee and cold coffee, will move towards room temperature)

• Reinforcing loop (after soil erode, less plants can grow, which means more soil erodes) (money begets more money via interest compounding)

• If a causes b, can b also cause a?

• Competing balancing loops (furnace vs outside temp, both are pulling towards their goals of target as equilibrium)

• Feedback can only affect future behavior, cannot go fast enough to fix current behavior, thus delay in reaction and feedbacks

  • World population competing, reinforcing loop via births and balancing loop via deaths
  • Among competing loops if one dominates another it's affect is larger and counters
  • When you're confronted with a scenario, question to ask to know if it's a good representation of reality, are driving factors likely to unfold this way, what drives the driving factors?
  • Reinforcing loop, economic growth begets more economic growth, balancing loop depreciation and obsolescence which winds depends on investment fraction, efficiency of capital, average capital lifetime
  • Systems with similar feedback structures produce similar behavior even if they look very different, economies and population growth
  • Car seller wants buffer to inventory, seller wants to keep buffer constant, inventory will vary based on demand, tis a balancing loop. However their are some delays, perception delay (need to notice trend), order delay,
  • Creates osolations, because delays create issues, spike means order more delay means the inventory left drops further, orders more to compensate, orders to much, osalates the other direction.
  • A delay in a balancing loop causes osalations
  • Car dealer has been reacting to quickly rather than the intuitiveity of the shorter stuff being better
  • Changing delays can be a powerful policy lever

• 2 stock systems

  • Constraints on resources, may be renewable or not.
  • Capital stock, is constrained by being finite, and thus as it falls in amount and get harder to extract because the easiest parts ore extracted first, profits and capital re investment falls and it ends up dying out
  • Renewable stock constrained by a renewable stock
  • Fishing, with capital stock as fishing boats, Hawks eating babies but not mama rabbits to mama can make more babies
  • Input is refilled over time, As gets scarce harder to get (harder to find or get)
  • Fish population, limited by their food and habitats, as gets lower Regen rates comes up, To low and they can't find one another, If tech is to aggressive, can find fish even in low numbers and fish them to extinction

• Overshoot, and adjustment to an equilibrium, Overshoot and oscillation around the equilibrium, Overshoot and collapse of the resource and industry dependent

  • Depends on how resilient the resource is in terms of regeneration after depletion. How hard the resource is to get when depleted.

Systems and us

• Resilience, many loops that can bring the system back into order, system can learn and grow.

  • Human body
  • Ecosystems
  • Not static, changes.
  • Profits and output often at the cost of resiliency. (Europe forests being single species vulnerable to disease, just in time delivery and low inventory for greater profits)
  • Systems also need to be managed for resilience

• Self organization property

  • A few simples rules and properties, ( god created earth for man, this castle to protect us and the church at its center was the midevil philosophy)

• Hierarchy

  • Complex forms can only result from smaller stable sub forms
  • Hierarchy forms to help each sub system do it's Job better.
  • Farmers forming a town for easier trade and general protection
  • Balance of controll center can't controll to much (micro managing), individual parts cannot sacrifice the goals of the whole (cancer)

Why systems surprise us

• our mental models are imperfect

• don't think in a series of events but patterns over time

• typically we think I'm linear systems which isn't how the world works at all

• There are no boundaries, we only think of them as useful tool based on our conversation and we need to understand the convos to draw them well

• Need to look at the limiting factor / reactant

• Growth will change what the limiting reactant overtime

• There are always limits to growth,.if they aren't self imposed they are system imposed. Best city, people flock, eventually something limits or breaks

• Basically everyone makes decisions that are best given their information and incentives.

  • This often breaks systems in that fishermen will over fish (because they can't possibly know when to much is done), managers will treat laborers as numbers and a laborers will treat managers as villains.

• Investment traps & opportunities

  • policy resistance: self balancing loop where efforts don't make dents. Align goals of sub systems. Make better incentives by understanding the issue and barriers to getting what you want. Let go, of the resistance and find better solutions everyone wants. Drug dealer want a balance of drugs and addicts, cops want no drugs, addicts want lots of drugs. If anyone grains some ground the others resist twice as hard to try and get back to their desired outcome.
  • tragity of the commons (shared resource that's errodable) overfishing which is where your incentives is to fish as much as possible but so is everyone's and as a result no fish.
  • 3 avoid, educate and moral disapproval, privitise / divide it up, regulate the commons w/ policing and penalties.
  • drift to low performance: gradual boil the frog kind of self feeding ever worsening loop, to get out keep standard absolute
  • escalation (you hit me, I hit you back a little harder then you his me a bit harder etc.) Way out, avoid getting in it. Or negotiate armistice
  • winning begets more winning. If you win better equipes you for future wins you get monopoly. Get out, diversify, feedback laws to keep monopolies from happening, anti trust laws. Equalize advantages everyone once in a while handicap. Different rewards that don't helped winning the future
  • addiction, ever increasing dependency on the thing to maintain state, where the thing give the illusion of solving the problem but the thing inherently makes it harder to maintain. Way out, don't get in, long term structuring
  • rule beating, getting around the spirit of the rules. Appearance of being followed but doesn't. Sesame seeds added to everything when people wanted to have allergy stuff. Way out, design rules better, for achieving purpose
  • seeking the wrong goals, confuse effort and results. If goals are defined poorly, system will create things that no one wants. Be more careful and design well.

Creating change in our systems and philosophy

• numbers: is quite bad, as long as it works with only the same levers or valves and in the same system. (Min wage increase doesn't eliminate poverty, more police funding doesn't eliminate crime) only work if it kicks off something else higher in the list

• buffers: sizes of stabilizing stocks relative to their flows. Rivers vs lakes. Less lake floods vs river floods. Emergency funds. Usually hard to change (Require building)

• intersections of stocks and flows, rebuild better system. Hard to change because expensive and slow to build new systems.

• delays, not often easily changeable, easy to slow down so price and tech can keep up. Careful change wild gyrations with delay shortening in money system

• balancing feedback loops. Emergency response mechanisms important even though rarely used. Free marker stuffs, prices, demand and supply of goods. Not subsidies, price fixing and taxes, but pollution tax, anti trust laws, .etc

  • democracy, self correcting between people and gov, people respond to gov action. Unfortunately, Lots of money spent to bais the loop here.

• Need to increase as system broadens. Global regulation.

• examples of strengthening a systems balancing loops to do good.

  • preventive medicine, exercise and nutrition to fight disease
  • integrated pest management that attaracks natural predators to keep pests down
  • freedom of info act
  • protection for whistle blowers
  • impact fees to internalize the cost of certain action

• re enforcing feedback loops

  • the more money the more interest, the more soil errodes the less plant life the more soil, slowing its growth to let balancing loops function. Success for the successful (rich get richer, better tutors, lending and getting interest, lobbying ) rather than trying to do a balancing loop via anti poverty programs. Rather than that weaken the reenforcing loops, vai inheritance tax, quality public educations, progressive income tax.
  • weaken success to the successful loops

• info loops

  • dutch energy meter visibility decreasing consumptions. New info to a place of wasn't before.
  • compelling feedback. Tax payers specify what their taxes get to be spent on, politicians who declare war have to be on the front lines. Accountability for actions

• rules, incentives punishments constraints

  • and who has powers over them, rules are for corporations not people. Successful successful loops.

• self organization

  • system evolves

• encourage variability and diversity for resilience

  • people feel like control is lost

• goals

  • goal of capitalism is just to basically be cancer and take over the world.
  • goal of system to keep any one group from taking over and killing everything has to trump any one groups ability to be cancer and win

• leaders at the top can sometimes change from the top. Regan, hitler,

• Mental Flexibility

  • more info for people is better for systems (simply requiring the publishing of company pollution info reduced pollution)

• reshape communication,

  • don't fall prey to the notion of just working with what you can measure as opposed to what you actually care about

• aim to enhance, growth, stability, diversity, sustianability, resilience. Whether they are easily measured or not.

• bring the consequences of actions online with decision maker. Pilot ride in plane so if it crashes they will die too

• balance of short and long and longer term thinking