Thinking in Systems

During the last months, I read a few posts from Alfredo Artiles talking about Systems Thinking, and that pushed me to read the book by Donella Meadows. It was a great decision, and I would like to tell you why, and leave my notes at this post.

Why was it useful to me?

There are a lot of reasons why I liked the book. However, the main one is because it gave me concepts, words, and terminology to explain why some of the things I did in my last years at Manfred worked well. There are times when you know what to do, what is the right solution, or how to fix something, but you are not sure how to explain, or why it works that way and no other.

Gut feeling is important, but it is harder to convince people that way. The concepts in the book help to visualize the parts of the systems, its relationships, its basic components, making it easier to explain why some solutions worked pretty well.

A fast walkthrough

The first chapters of the book are introductory and explain how to visualize systems and its types. Maybe some mathematics behind the graphs you need to imagine by yourself, but it is an invaluable way to represent systems and helpful to analyze them. The book is introductory and it gives you what you would expect from it.

After some chapters knowing different kinds of systems, what a feedback or reinforcing loops are, and other fun things, the author starts with more theoretical chapters. I don’t remember a book so small with so much information in it.

The good part is that even having a lot of information, it is very easy to read, and the author is always giving examples from the real world that help to understand the concepts better.

The last chapter introduces the reader to some important tips to start working with systems, which deserves some specific notes for itself.

Conclusions

It was one of my favorite books from the last year, without any doubt. It is not very big but contains a lot of information that you must digest slowly and with attention.

It is useful nearly for any professional, but especially for those that are into fixing problems, optimizing systems, and in general, the people that like to understand things better.

But you need to take care, it is an introduction, when you finish reading it you will have the information to start digging but by no means you will be an expert in the topic. That will require a lot of practice and hands on, I believe.

Misc and references

• If you want to know more details, I recommended reading the book, but you can also take a look at my sketchnotes here.
• Feature photo from rawpixel.com