Donella H. Meadows Quotes

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.

We can't impose our will on 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'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.

a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.

Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

So, what is a system? A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem.

People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.

Let's face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That's what makes the world interesting, that's what makes it beautiful, and that's what makes it work.

An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.

A system* is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.

You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams.

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.

This ancient Sufi story was told to teach a simple lesson but one that we often ignore: The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. That’s why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine.

stop looking for who’s to blame; instead you’ll start asking, “What’s the system?” The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.

A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.

We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can't make it perfect.

You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,

Once you start listing the elements of a system, there is almost no end to the process. You can divide elements into sub-elements and then sub-sub-elements. Pretty soon you lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Sustainability is a new idea to many people, and many find it hard to understand. But all over the world there are people who have entered into the exercise of imagining and bringing into being a sustainable world. They see it as a world to move toward not reluctantly, but joyfully, not with a sense of sacrifice, but a sense of adventure. A sustainable world could be very much better than the one we live in today.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

Model utility depends not on whether its driving scenarios are realistic (since no one can know that for sure), but on whether it responds with a realistic pattern of behavior.

The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!

The systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and • hone our abilities to understand parts, • see interconnections, • ask “what-if ” questions about possible future behaviors, and • be creative and courageous about system redesign.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.

A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity.

One of the strangest assumptions of present-day mental models is the idea that world of moderation must be a world of strict, centralized government control. For a sustainable economy, that kind of control is not possible, desirable, or necessary.

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. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren't designed to produce them, and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. —ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We can’t impose our will on 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.

The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.

According to the competitive exclusion principle, if a reinforcing feedback loop rewards the winner of a competition with the means to win further competitions, the result will be the elimination of all but a few competitors. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.

we don’t talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about

A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called “drift to low performance” is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are “not news.” They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can’t expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. 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. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love.

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. 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 to be 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 that may become entangled with your own identity.

The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system’s performance.

The difference between a sustainable society and a present-day economic recession is like the difference between stopping and automobile purposefully with the brakes versus stopping it by crashing into a brick wall. When the present economy overshoots, it turns around too quickly and unexpectedly for people and enterprises to retrain, relocate, and readjust. A deliberate transition to sustainability would take place slowly enough, and with enough forewarning, to that people and businesses could find their places in the new economy.

But rules for sustainability, like every workable social rule, would be put into place not to destroy freedoms, but to create freedoms or to protect them. A ban on bank robbing inhibits the freedom of the thief in order to assure that everyone else has the freedom to deposit and withdraw money safely. A ban on overuse of a renewable resource or on the generation of a dangerous pollutant protects vital freedoms in a similar way.

If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.

The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor.

Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So

The most effective way of dealing with policy resistance is to find a way of aligning the various goals of the subsystems, usually by providing an overarching goal that allows all actors to break out of their bounded rationality.

In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.

When we, system dynamicists, see a pattern persist in many parts of a system over long periods, we assume that it has causes embedded in the feedback loop structure of the system. Running the same system harder or faster will not change the pattern as long as the structure is not revised. Growth as usual has widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Continuing growth as usual will never close that gap. Only changing the structure of the system—the chains of causes and effects—will do that.

The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable. The culture tends to deny the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology, the workings of a free market, and the growth of the economy as the solution to all problems, even the problems created by growth.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes.... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. -RUSSELL ACKOFF,' operations theorist

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter—they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else.

The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors—and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.

Every balancing feedback loop has its breakdown point, where other loops pull the stock away from its goal more strongly than it can pull back.

most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information.

Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

The tragedy of the commons arises from missing (or too long delayed) feedback from the resource to the growth of the users of that resource.

In other words, if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior.

A system is a set of things-people, cells, molecules, or whatever-interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.

A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.

System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.

Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well.

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

Pay Attention to What Is Important, Not Just What Is Quantifiable

If we’re to understand anything, we have to simplify, which means we have to make boundaries.

Stocks usually change slowly. They can act as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, and sources of momentum in a system.

The world is nonlinear. Trying to make it linear for our mathematical or administrative convenience is not usually a good idea even when feasible, and it is rarely feasible.

A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements-as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.

We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.

You think that because you understand "one" that you must therefore understand "two" because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand "and." -Sufi teaching story

self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.

Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.

Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “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. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

That’s why behavior-based econometric models are pretty good at predicting the near-term performance of the economy, quite bad at predicting the longer-term performance, and terrible at telling one how to improve the performance of the economy.

The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too. A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power is no match for the temperature change imposed on the system. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.

These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.

embodied in the notion that there is no certainty in any worldview. But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. If no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose.

When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system.

Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers. Self-organization

The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little “real world” evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.8 You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will on 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.

Error-embracing is the condition for learning. It means seeking and using—and sharing—information about what went wrong with what you expected or hoped would go right. Both error embracing and living with high levels of uncertainty emphasize our personal as well as societal vulnerability. Typically we hide our vulnerabilities from ourselves as well as from others. But … to be the kind of person who truly accepts his responsibility … requires knowledge of and access to self far beyond that possessed by most people in this society.9

I realize with fright that my impatience for the re-establishment of democracy had something almost communist in it; or, more generally, something rationalist. I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly. I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create. We have to patiently sow the seeds, assiduously water the earth where they are sown and give the plants the time that is their own. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history. —Václav Havel,7 playwright, last President of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic

After basic needs are met, higher incomes produce gains in happiness only up to a point, beyond which further increases in consumption do not enhance a sense of well-being. The cumulative impact of surging per capita consumption, rapid population growth, human dominance of every ecological system, and the forcing of pervasive biological changes worldwide has created the very real possibility, according to twenty-two prominent biologists and ecologists in a 2012 study in Nature, that we may soon reach a dangerous “planetary scale ‘tipping point.’ ” According to one of the coauthors, James H. Brown, “We’ve created this enormous bubble of population and economy. If you try to get the good data and do the arithmetic, it’s just unsustainable. It’s either got to be deflated gently, or it’s going to burst.” In the parable of the boy who cried wolf, warnings of danger that turned out to be false bred complacency to the point where a subsequent warning of a danger that was all too real was ignored. Past warnings that humanity was about to encounter harsh limits to its ability to grow much further were often perceived as false: from Thomas Malthus’s warnings about population growth at the end of the eighteenth century to The Limits to Growth, published in 1972 by Donella Meadows, among others. We resist the notion that there might be limits to the rate of growth we are used to—in part because new technologies have so frequently enabled us to become far more efficient in producing more with less and to substitute a new resource for one in short supply. Some of the resources we depend upon the most, including topsoil (and some key elements, like phosphorus for fertilizers), however, have no substitutes and are being depleted.