Thinking in Systems

"My background in political science was all about linear, causal thinking, and the discovery of systems thinking was absolutely mind-blowing for me. Meadows’s book is the best comprehensive primer on it. It’s not a particularly easy book to read but it’s essential. I think every child should be learning systems thinking—about feedback loops, tipping points and exponential functions—because it’s fundamental to so many things. It helps us understand how the human body works—how our body controls its temperature, for example: when we get too hot we sweat, when we get too cold we shiver. It also enables us to better understand our economies and ecology. Thinking in Systems raises some really basic questions like how do you create an economic system which is self-regulating and can sustain itself over the long term? Well, the answers are in things like the circular economy movement and Doughnut Economics . It also raises questions about political systems: there’s a failure of feedback, I realised. We’re not getting the politicians we need for long-term thinking because we don’t get any feedback information from future generations. That’s part of the design failure I mentioned before. Systems thinking helps you see that. One the other things about Donella Meadows’s book that I particularly love is the section about leverage points. What does it take to change a system? She argues that the best way is not by tinkering with, say, the tax rates or subsidies or regulations and standards. Rather, the main level you want to influence is the level of paradigm change. Now you could get a similar message from reading Thomas Kuhn or Karl Mannheim or Pierre Bourdieu, who all recognised the importance of worldviews and the ways they shape society, but I think Donella Meadows gets this point across really well and clearly. “I think every child should be learning systems thinking” So when it comes to the question I want to tackle—the pathological short-termism of our economic systems and political systems—we need new ideas to help reconfigure our worldviews. We need long-term thinking itself to become a matter of public discussion and public debate: it needs to enter the ‘ethnosphere’—a word coined by the anthropologist Wade Davis to describe the swirl of ideas, beliefs, myths and attitudes that prevail in society. I expand on this in the chapter on culture in The Good Ancestor . We need to reinvent the ‘ethnosphere’, which constitutes the cultural air that we breathe. Another thing regarding Donella Meadows and leverage points. If you’re going to change a system you need to change its goal. There are plenty of people in the corporate world interested in the long view: how do you create companies that prosper for decades and beyond? As a former head of Goldman Sachs once said, ‘we’re greedy, but long-term greedy not short-term greedy’. That’s long-term thinking of a kind, but it is not the kind I promote in my book, because the goal for almost all companies remains profits and growth and maximizing shareholder value. For me, however, the ultimate goal should be to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. That’s ecological economics again – learning to live within the biocapacity of the living world. It’s a fundamental telos or goal to guide long-term thinking for the welfare of future generations, the universal strangers of the future."

"The first book I want to talk about shows this really nicely in all kinds of contexts, from the interpersonal to business to the environment. It’s Donella H Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer . It gives a really nice overview of how initial conditions (for example, who the couple are at the beginning of a relationship) lead to patterns that determine what the relationship feels like to the people in it. Systems thinking says that once you have two people who sort of fall into each other’s orbit, the relationship becomes a kind of third force. It takes on a life of its own. Certain initial properties, perhaps insignificant in themselves, can take on huge significance. Here’s a trivial example with important implications. Let’s say you and I set up housekeeping together. We decide we’re going to share the washing-up chores after every meal. How nice! But let’s say that you’re just a little faster when it comes to washing dishes than I am and you do just a little better job. Can such a small difference have huge implications? It can. There you are, seeing me stumble through a job that you can do just a bit better and faster. I’m not terrible, just not as good as you. But the impact will be that it will be easy for you to feel impatient with how I do it. You’ll might well be itching to jump in and do it yourself. Months pass, and the next thing you know we’re not sharing that chore at all. You’ve somehow gotten saddled with the job. Of course, now that you’re doing the washing-up every night, that’s one extra chore for you. And that might make you a little resentful. You might or might not blow up. You might act ever so slightly cold and hostile. Maybe not even enough for me to notice consciously. But I will notice it, and I will respond. And then you’ll respond to my response, and then I’ll respond to your response. And we’re off and running in a self-maintaining cycle of anger and distance. “Two nice normal people in a terrible mess not because they’re terrible people but because of the properties of systems” And there you have it. Two nice normal people in a terrible mess not because they’re terrible people but because of the properties of systems. Almost all problems in relationships come from processes like this. Now here’s the miracle. While this is very hard for two people to sort out on their own – which explains why we feel so stuck so often in our own relationships – it’s surprisingly easy for a good therapist who understands systems to sort this out, and she can do it without anyone feeling blamed. And that makes all the difference. Some studies I’ve seen have put the success rate for couples therapy at about 67%. That is, two thirds of couples receiving professional help end up with meaningful and lasting improvement in how they deal with each other. Is 67% a good number? Yes indeed, from two very different perspectives. First, it’s a sad fact that most couples seek help only after things have been quite bad for quite a long time. That means that small difficulties and differences have become rather big. No wonder most couples are quite a challenge for most therapists. It’s as if you were a cancer doctor who only saw people with late-stage cancers. Given this, 67% is damned good. Second, compare this number to the benefits of most medications. Here in the States, the Food and Drug Administration would be head over heels to see a new drug that demonstrated effectiveness on 67% of people and was safe in almost every case. If couples therapy were a drug, it would be considered a very good drug. There is one big qualification to this good news. The majority of therapists are below average in effectiveness – yes, that’s quite possible; here’s another example, the great majority of incomes are below the average income for most countries – and to make matters worse, therapists have no real check on their necessarily biased self-perception of effectiveness. So what do you, the prospective patient, do about this? First, believe that couples therapy is generally very helpful and therefore do yourself a big favour. Do not wait until you’re thoroughly miserable before seeking help. The moment just one of you can admit you’re disappointed, frustrated, and unhappy, or even if you’re concerned that your marriage might be off course, seek help. Don’t wait. “Do not wait until you’re thoroughly miserable before seeking help” Second, make sure you’re content with your therapist. This is what you should be seeing by the second meeting: That your therapist has already started to make suggestions and interventions designed to move you toward change, and that indeed do bring about some change. That your therapist ‘gets’ you. That the way she treats both of you feels roughly balanced. That your therapist seems to have an eclectic, results oriented, evidence based approach, as opposed to using some one theory or to spending hours collecting information about you. That she asks for feedback about what you find works and doesn’t work, and uses that feedback to tailor her approach to working with you. And she does not just ask you to share your feelings with each other or to just talk to one another."

"This was the book that most made me realise I had been taught in a very particular paradigm because, for the first time, I encountered a completely different starting point for thinking. My first response was to feel really cross: why, as an economist, wasn’t I taught to think like this? Economics is actually a subset of systems thinking, one which sets out some very constrained assumptions in order to make market theory work. So, it was a real revelation for me to discover such a different approach to thinking and analysing challenges. The essence of systems thinking is that most of the interesting patterns that we see in the world—from the dynamics of family relationships to the boom and bust of stock markets, from the rise of the 1%, to the collapse of ecosystems—are very effectively understood if we think of them in terms of feedback loops. All things are interrelated and some have very strong reinforcing feedback effects: say, the more chickens you have, the more eggs you get, and the more eggs you have, the more chickens you get. Other relationships have balancing feedback effects: when I get hot, my body sweats in order to cool me down, for example. Most of the interesting relationships and patterns that exist in the world can be best understood as the interplay of these loops. “The essence of systems thinking is that most of the interesting patterns that we see in the world are very effectively understood if we think of them in terms of feedback loops” To be straight-up, this book isn’t an easy read because Meadow’s sets the concepts out quite technically in the opening chapters. But it’s very discursively written and full of great examples from her experience in life. I’ve recommended it to people enthusiastically and they’ve sometimes come back saying that it was quite hard work. But I loved it because I felt, at last, I’m not just being taught a set of specific assumptions that I’m required to take on board and accept as the tenets of economics. Rather, I’m being taught how to see and interpret patterns in the world. Living in Oxford, I can go to Otmoor on a winter’s afternoon and watch a hundred thousand starlings gathering in the sky, making extraordinary patterns in a murmuration. Every bird is following a fairly simple rule, something like ‘keep an inch from your neighbours and when your neighbours turn, then turn’. But the emergent effect of all these birds following the same rule is an unpredictable, awe-inspiring pattern in the sky. From there you can think, actually, that’s not so dissimilar to the way that stock markets behave. We can do a far better job of understanding patterns such as these in the world if we bring systems thinking to bear. You’ve jumped right to my favourite section and quote in the book. The first half of the book can seem quite hard going: you’re learning a new way of thinking and hence need to acquire the core concepts that underpin it. But the further you go through the book, the more and more playful it gets. At the very end of the book there are two chapters that I absolutely love. One is ‘Leverage points: places to intervene in a system.’ If we believe systems need to be changed, how can we change them effectively? Very low on Meadows’ list is tinkering with prices which is typically the first place that conventional economics tells us to go. Sometimes, of course, prices can be an effective place to intervene, but in economics we restrict our options almost exclusively to financial variables, and this is often not enough. Actually, as she spells out, the higher you go up her list of leverage points, right up near the top is changing the paradigm. And when I was beginning to write Doughnut Economics and came back to this book, I had this lovely sense of ‘well, that’s just what I’m aiming to do.’ The following chapter, ‘Living in a world of systems’—contains advice on how to be an effective systems thinker. It’s about staying humble and getting to know the beat of a system before you even try and change it—understand how it’s working now and understand what’s already working before you charge in and start trying to tweak it. This is really excellent advice for anyone who thinks that they’re intervening in an economy or any other complex system that looks like it’s not working. There’s a particular quote on changing paradigms that I have marked in my copy of the book. It says, “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.” That’s what excites me about the power of visual framing. If you can show someone a picture that makes them say ‘I’ve never seen things like this before’ they may well feel empowered to ask new questions that arise from that picture. I discovered the power of doing this back in 2012 when I first drew the doughnut diagram and published it with Oxfam. I was absolutely gobsmacked by the reaction to it. So many people were saying ‘I’ve always thought of development like this and now I’ve got the diagram, I feel like I can ask new questions, I can challenge the system, and this is a beginning of a new way of thinking about economics’. It’s extraordinary what power a picture has to start changing the paradigm. So, this is the leverage point I’ve chosen to work on. It’s long-term, it doesn’t mean you change policy tomorrow, it’s focused on making ideas accessible to the generation of students who are at school or university today and helping to embed broader perspectives in their minds. Because the thing that makes me really angry is that this generation of students today are going to be the policy makers of 2050 but they are still being taught economics from the textbooks of 1950 based on the theories of 1850. And they know it. That’s why many of them are rebelling, organising at universities worldwide to demand a new syllabus. I’m passionate about bringing into their education images like the doughnut that begin to describe the 21st century context."