Meadows opens with an excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those pattens will repeat themselves...There's so much talk about the system and so little understanding." -Robert PirsigThis is particularly applicable to the "discourse"--more about limiting or expanding government influence than actual dialogue--on healthcare reform. We hear talk of coverage. Coverage, coverage, coverage. There are millions of people without coverage. And so we need to act. This, in my opinion, is plenty of cause to act, but not sufficiently attentive to more important questions, like, "Why are there millions of Americans without coverage in the first place? And what is it about the nature of the system--and by extension, the rationale used to design it--that let so many people slip through the cracks?" That said, if the health care system was designed, in its current form, to allay wartime labor shortages and an alarmingly impoverished elderly class, reformers must ask themselves if America today has different needs--it does: we have a job shortages, and an elderly class wealthier than any other age group--and thus a need for different rationale.
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. By this reasoning, when a system malfunctions, remedies lie in rethinking and manipulating the system, rather than regulating external forces."
A few examples of applied systems thinking I found helpful:
-Political leaders don't cause reccessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.
-The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.
-Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict--not even the addict. It is only through understanding the addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.
Understanding Systems Principles:
"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 piences, to solve problems by acting on or controlling the world around us."
This is the primary thrust of science: to understand what things are by reducing them to the their parts, studying the way they react independently to various stimuli under microscopes in laboratories, or under defined circumstances.
"On the other hand, long before we were educated in rational analysis, we all dealt with complex systems. We are complex systems--our own bodies are magnificent examples of integrated, interconnected, self-maintaining complexity...We have built up intuitively, without analysis, often without words, a practical understanding of how these systems work, and how to work with them."Here Meadows suggests that we may understand what we want to understand--say, the human body--there is a character inherent in it that is indiscernible by the rational thought, no matter how concentrated. This aspect of reality is understood primarily by experience, which is invariably constructed by social values and, to be more specific, the values of the observer. Perhaps a good example is the way a craftsman knows wood. He has an impeccable sense of it and what it does and how it will react to the tools he uses, but that sense draws in no way upon some conceptual understanding produced by analysis. Meadows does not intend to delegitimize rationality or science or reason here, but to remind us that it certainly isn't enough, especially when we're dealing with human-centered systems. She is asking us to rethink what it means to know a thing, and more precisely to consider that there is a complex, almost irreducibly, nature to everything, to be taken into account. We know these things, she explains, intuitively, for lack of a better word.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents, but because they are often embedded in larger systems, some of these "solutions" have caused greater problems. Ongoing issues like hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, chronic disease, and unemployment, "persist in spite of analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them...so, we must do things, or at least see things, and think things, in a different way."
"A systems thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems and:
-hone our abilities to understand parts
-see interconnections
-ask what-if quesstions about possible future behaviors
-be creative and courageous about system redesign"
