Living in a world of systems

17 important questions on Living in a world of systems

Which guideline is applicable for the following description;
- Before you disturb the system, you should watch how it behaves. You have to learn about history, ask people.

Get the beat of the system.

Which guideline is applicable for the following description;
- Everything you know is a mental model. Get your model where it can be viewed and ask others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.

Expose your mental models to the light of the day.

Which guideline is applicable for the following description;
- Meadows guesses that most of what goes wrong in systems is because of biased, late or missing information.
- Information is power

Honor, respect and distribute information
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Which guideline is applicable for the following description?
- Avoid language pollution
- Expand language so we can talk about complexity

Use language with care and enrich it with systems concepts.

Which guideline is applicable for the following description?
- You can't leave the non-measurable elements out of the system. Pretending that something doesn't exist leads to faulty models.

Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.

Which guideline is applicable?
- Especially when there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta feedback loops.

Also elaborate on what meta feedback loops are.

Meta feedback loops are feedback loops that alter, correct and expand loops.

This is for the make feedback policies for feedback systems. 

Which guideline is applicable?
- Don't maximize parts of the system while ignoring the whole

Go for the good whole

Which guideline is applicable?
- Before you charge in to making things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there

Listen the the wisdom of the system

Which guideline is applicable?
- A guideline for both analysis and design. In analysis; it means looking for the way the system creates its own behavior.

Locate responsibility in the system

What is intrinsic responsibility?

Send feedback about consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compelling to the decision makers.

Which guideline is applicable?

- System thinking is about trusting your intuition more and your finger-crossed rationality less. This, to learn as much as you can.

Stay humble, stay a learner.

Considering the guideline stay humble, stay a learner; what is error embracing?

This is making mistakes and admitting them in order to learn.

Which guideline is applicable?
- The universe is messy, nonlinear, turbulent and dynamic.

Celebrate complexity.

Which guideline is applicable?
- The longer the operant time horizon, the better the chances for survival. You need to watch both the long term and short term.

Expand time horizons.

Which guideline is applicable?
- If representatives are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct, they will have to go into learning mode.

Defy the disciplines.

Which guideline is applicable?

- If moral arguments are not sufficient, then system thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones.

Expand the boundary of caring.

What is the most damaging archetype?

Drift to low performance.

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