Donella Meadows

The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil-price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.

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. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

On the one hand, we have been taught to analyze, to use our rational ability, to trace direct paths from cause to effect, to look at things in small and understandable pieces, to solve problems by acting on or controlling the world around us. That training, the source of much personal and societal power, leads us to see presidents and competitors, OPEC and the flu and drugs as the causes of our problems.

Modern systems theory, bound up with computers and equations, hides the fact that it traffics in truths known at some level by everyone. It is often possible, therefore, to make a direct translation from systems jargon to traditional wisdom.

Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve.

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.

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.

Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once.

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

If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.