Good teachers

Micheal Leon
I perch the Slinky on one upturned palm. With the fi ngers of the other
hand, I grasp it from the top, partway down its coils. Then I pull the bottom
hand away. The lower end of the Slinky drops, bounces back up again, yo-
yos up and down, suspended from my fi ngers above. “What made the
Slinky bounce up and down like that?” I ask students. “Your hand. You took
away your hand,” they say. So I pick up the box the Slinky came in and hold
it the same way, poised on a fl attened palm, held from above by the fi ngers
of the other hand. With as much dramatic fl ourish as I can muster, I pull the
lower hand away. Nothing happens. The box just hangs there, of course.
“Now once again. What made the Slinky bounce up and down?” The answer
clearly lies within the Slinky itself. The hands that manipulate it suppress or
release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the spring. That
is a central insight of systems theory. Once we see the relationship between
structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work,
what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better
behavior patterns. As our world continues to change rapidly and become
more complex, systems thinking will help us manage, adapt, and see the
wide range of choices we have before us. It is a way of thinking that gives us
the freedom to identify root causes of problems and see new opportunities.
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. When it comes to Slinkies, this idea is easy enough to
understand. When it comes to individuals, companies, cities, or economies,
it can be heretical. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!
An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event
applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. Think for
a moment about the implications of that idea: • Political leaders don’t cause
recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure
of the market economy. • Competitors rarely cause a company to lose
market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing
company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.
• The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oilprice 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.
• The fl u virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to fl
ourish 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 addiction as
part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to
address it. Something about statements like these is deeply unsettling.
Something else is purest common sense. I submit that those two
somethings—a resistance to and a recognition of systems principles—come
from two kinds of human experience, both of which are familiar to
everyone. 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 fl u and drugs as the causes of our problems. 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 magnifi cent
examples of integrated, interconnected, self-maintaining complexity. Every
person we encounter, every organization, every animal, garden, tree, and
forest is a complex system. We have built up intuitively, without analysis,
often without words, a practical understanding of how these systems work,
and how to work with them. Modern systems theory, bound up with
computers and equations, hides the fact that it traffi cs in truths known at

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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 diffi cult to solve. — A stitch in time saves nine.
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 more stable and less vulnerable to
external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. — Don’t put all
your eggs in one basket. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western
society has benefi ted from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition
and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume
that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost
irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away
from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the
technical fi x that will make a problem go away. Serious problems have been
solved by focusing on external agents— preventing smallpox, increasing
food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long
distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of
our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those
most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes,
have refused to go away. 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 fi nd
the courage and wisdom to restructure it. Obvious. Yet subversive. An old
way of seeing. Yet somehow new. Comforting, in that the solutions are in
our hands. Disturbing, because we must do things, or at least see things and
think about things, in a different way. This book is about that different way

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of seeing and thinking. It is intended for people who may be wary of the
word “systems” and the fi eld of systems analysis, even though they may
have been doing systems thinking all their lives. I have kept the discussion
nontechnical because I want to show what a long way you can go toward
understanding systems without turning to because there is a problem in
discussing systems only with words. Words and sentences must, by
necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen
all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many
directions simultaneously. To discuss them properly, it is necessary
somehow to use a language that shares some of the same properties as the
phenomena under discussion. Pictures work for this language better than
words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once. I will build up
systems pictures gradually, starting with very simple ones. I think you’ll fi nd
that you can understand this graphical language easily. I start with the
basics: the defi nition of a system and a dissection of its parts (in a
reductionist, unholistic way). Then I put the parts back together to show
how they interconnect to make the basic operating unit of a system: the
feedback loop. Next I will introduce you to a systems zoo—a collection of
some common and interesting types of systems. You’ll see how a few of
these creatures behave and why and where they can be found. You’ll
recognize them; they’re all around you and even within you. With a few of
the zoo “animals”—a set of specifi c examples—as a foundation, I’ll step
back and talk about how and why systems work so beautifully and the
reasons why they so often surprise and confound us. I’ll talk about why
everyone or everything in a system can act dutifully and rationally, yet all
these well-meaning actions too often add up to a perfectly terrible result.
And why things so often happen much faster or slower than everyone thinks
they will. And why you can be doing something that has always worked and
suddenly discover, to your great disappointment, that your action no longer
works. And why a system might suddenly, and without warning, jump into a
kind of behavior you’ve never seen before. That discussion will lead to us to
look at the common problems that the systems-thinking community has
stumbled upon over and over again through working in corporations and

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governments, economies and ecosystems, physiology and psychology.
“There’s another case of the tragedy of the commons,” we fi nd ourselves
saying as we look at an allocation system for sharing water resource among
communities or fi nancial resources among schools. Or we family, a
community, or a nation. Or we witness “addiction”—which can be caused by
many more agents than caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and narcotics. Systems
thinkers call these common structures that produce characteristic behaviors
“archetypes.” When I fi rst planned this book, I called them “system traps.”
Then I added the words “and opportunities,” because these archetypes,
which are responsible for some of the most intransigent and potentially
dangerous problems, also can be transformed, with a little systems
understanding, to produce much more desirable behaviors. From this
understanding I move into what you and I can do about restructuring the
systems we live within. We can learn how to look for leverage points for
change. I conclude with the largest lessons of all, the ones derived from the
wisdom shared by most systems thinkers I know. For those who want to
explore systems thinking further, the Appendix provides ways to dig deeper
into the subject with a glossary, a bibliography of systems thinking
resources, a summary list of systems principles, and equations for the
models described in Part One. When our small research group moved from
MIT to Dartmouth College years ago, one of the Dartmouth engineering
professors watched us in seminars for a while, and then dropped by our offi
ces. “You people are different,” he said. “You ask different kinds of
questions. You see things I don’t see. Somehow you come at the world in a
different way. How? Why?” That’s what I hope to get across throughout this
book, but especially in its conclusion. I don’t think the systems way of seeing
is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary,
and therefore revealing. You can see some things through the lens of the
human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope, others through
the lens of a telescope, and still others through the lens of systems theory.
Everything seen through each kind of lens is actually there. Each way of
seeing allows our knowledge of the wondrous world in which we live to
become a little more complete. At a time when the world is more messy,

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more crowded, more interconnected, more interdependent, and more
rapidly changing than ever before, the more ways of seeing, the better. The
systems-thinking lens allows us to reclaim our intuition about whole systems
and
• hone our abilities to understand parts,
• see interconnections,
• ask “what-if” questions about possible future behaviors, and
• be creative and courageous about system redesign.
Then we can use our insights to make a difference in ourselves and our
world.