44 Quotes by Donella H. Meadows

Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.

Stocks usually change slowly. They can act as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, and sources of momentum in a system.

You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.

A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.

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.

Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!