38 Quotes About Systems-thinking

... The result, in this world view, is that real freedom comes not from the decisions of an ego-self’s “will” but from action without any Selfwhatsoever

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link, for if that fails the chain fails and the object that it has been holding up falls to the ground.

Wherever there is human intervention, there is subjective prejudice. Systems implementation is the only solution for efficiency.

One of the biggest challenges for modern management is how to put the right people with the right capability in the right position to solve the right problem at the right time.

Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try to bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have mental models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this latticework of models.

The main lesson here is that not every problem can be solved at the level of abstraction where it manifests.

Two examples illustrate the redundancy principle. First, when a virtual machine fails in a cloud-based system, an identical instance is started automatically. Second, a critically important system should have at least one secondary backup system that runs in parallel with the primary system to ensure a safe fallback. Leading up to the next principle, we note that the secondary system should differ from the primary system to avoid both failing for the same reasons.

Note that there is not a focus on eliminating failures. Systems without failures, although robust, become brittle and fragile. When failures occur, it is more likely that the teams responding will be unprepared, and this could dramatically increase the impact of the incident.

We are seeking another basic outlook: the world as an organization. This would profoundly change categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive inter-dependencies.