Leveraged
Donella Meadows was a systems professor who worked at MIT & Dartmouth. Her work, especially her posthumous book Thinking in Systems, has been wildly influential for how I work within in consulting practice, as well as how I see the world. The second search result for Thinking in Systems is literally a pirated PDF of it. Enjoy.
Systems thinking sounds like something a tech bro would espouse, naïvely thinking that the whole world can be distilled down to some rationalist core. But at its purest, systems thinking is all about cause and effect, understanding the way things work.
In Thinking in Systems, Meadows lays out a left-brained, parameter-based taxonomy of systems, the kind that you typically see in logic textbooks. Then she torches it, by saying that you must listen to the system, that you must operate on instinct, that you must embrace the messy & human, that you must dance with the system:
People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.
Meadows is onto something when she talks about the desire for control. This is a deeply masculine impulse that not enough of us reckon with. We just spent two years giving up control, or at least the implied perception of control. The answer:
Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity–our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.
Despite Meadows’ STEM background, Thinking in Systems is released on an environmentalist press, and at its core it’s all about how to create nourishing, lasting systems of change in the world. It feels like the left-brained spiritual sibling to Braiding Sweetgrass, the essential text from Robin Wall Kimmerer that pretty much everyone I know read during the first year of the Bad Times®.
I spend a lot of brain cycles wondering how we can consciously envision a more kind & generous world, and I work hard to walk the walk. I don’t buy more than I need. I bike or take the train everywhere. I eat precisely as much meat as my body requires of me. One hopes that this is enough; it is never enough; it is all we can do. I have come to these realizations through gaining an awareness of the systems we all live within, attempting to leverage them however I can. Are you doing the same?