Quotes About System

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Now imagine starting again with a full tub, and again open the drain, but this time, when the tub is about half empty, turn on the inflow faucet so the rate of water flowing in is just equal to that flowing out. What happens? The amount of water in the tub stays constant at whatever level it had reached when the inflow became equal to the outflow. It is in a state of dynamic equilibrium—its level does not change, although water is continuously flowing through it.

How to know whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff: A) Can you identify parts? … and B) Do the parts affect each other? … and C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? … and perhaps D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?

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

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.

The best way to deduce the system's purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.