Dancing With Systems -
Donella Meadows
Donella Meadows, founder of the Academy for Systems Change.
The focus of Donella’s work was creating functioning systems to address the complex problems facing humanity.
“the practices I see my colleagues adopting, consciously or unconsciously, as they encounter systems”.
Donella Meadows
The Dance
1. Get the beat.
Watch how the system behaves; focus on facts, not theories.
Dynamic understanding rather than a static picture.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
Pay attention to the value of what's already there.
Don't be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system's self-maintenance capacities.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
Collect as many hypotheses/models as possible and don't rule them out without evidence.
Put your mental models down in words or lists or pictures or diagrams: this will make your thinking clearer and you will admit your uncertainties faster.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
Small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course.
5. Honor and protect information.
Systems work better with more timely, accurate, and complete information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
What are the ways the system creates its own behavior (as opposed to outside influences)?
Design 'intrinsic responsibility' into the system: it sends feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly, quickly, and compellingly to the decision-makers.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
Design policies that change depending on the state of the system.
Design learning into the management process.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
No one can precisely define or measure any value (e.g. justice, democracy, security, or freedom).
We need to design systems to produce values, or they will cease to exist.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
Especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the system. But parts cannot survive without the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
Watch both the short and the long term. Phenomena at different timescales are nested within each other.
11. Expand thought horizons.
Understanding the whole system requires true interdisciplinary working where all are committed to solving the problem rather than being correct.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
Most people already know that the moral rules and the practical rules turn out to be the same rules They just have to bring themselves to believe what they already know.
13. Celebrate complexity.
Diversity, not uniformity, is what makes the world interesting, beautiful, and work!
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.
Don't weigh the bad news more than the good.
Keep standards absolute.
The Serviceberry
Robin Wall Kimmerer
“I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared, rather than depreciating with use."
Robon is Potawatomi Nation member and a plant ecologist a, Her writing is a fusion of science and Indigenous knowledge in a uniquely insightful take on how we experience ourselves as part of the natural world generally, and in particular our relationship with plants.
This essay was in the Emergence Magazine which offers an alternative economic model. While harvesting serviceberries in the company of a host of birds near her home, she considers the benefits of an economy based on generosity, and asks, how can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?
“Thriving is possible,” she writes, “only if you have nurtured strong relations with your community.” The free market system sells individualism and defines value by monetary worth, She proposes an ethic of reciprocity and interconnection.