Chapter 9
In 1993, Donella (Dana) Meadows completed a draft of the book you now hold. The manuscript was not published at the time, but circulated informally for years. Dana died quite unexpectedly in 2001—before she completed this book. In the years since her death, it became clear that her writings have continued to be useful to a wide range of readers. Dana was a scientist and writer, and one of the best communicators in the world of systems modeling.
In 1972, Dana was lead author of The Limits to Growth —a best-selling and widely translated book. The cautions she and her fellow authors issued then are recognized today as the most accurate warnings of how unsustainable patterns could, if unchecked, wreak havoc across the globe. That book made headlines around the world for its observations that continual growth in population and consumption could severely damage the ecosystems and social systems that support life on earth, and that a drive for limitless economic growth could eventually disrupt many local, regional, and global systems. The findings in that book and its updates are, once again, making front-page news as we reach peak oil, face the realities of climate change, and watch a world of 6.6 billion people deal with the devastating consequences of physical growth.
In short, Dana helped usher in the notion that we have to make a major shift in the way we view the world and its systems in order to correct our course. Today, it is widely accepted that systems thinking is a critical tool in addressing the many environmental, political, social, and economic challenges we face around the world. Systems, big or small, can behave in similar ways, and understanding those ways is perhaps our best hope for making lasting change on many levels. Dana was writing this book to bring that concept to a wider audience, and that is why I and my colleagues at the Sustainability Institute decided it was time to publish her manuscript posthumously.
Will another book really help the world and help you, the reader? I think so. Perhaps you are working in a company (or own a company) and are struggling to see how your business or organization can be part of a shift toward a better world. Or maybe you’re a policy maker who is seeing others “push back” against your good ideas and good intentions. Perhaps you’re a manager who has worked hard to fix some important problems in your company or community, only to see other challenges erupt in their wake. As one who advocates for changes in how a society (or a family) functions, what it values and protects, you may see years of progress easily undone in a few swift reactions. As a citizen of an increasingly global society, perhaps you are just plain frustrated with how hard it is to make a positive and lasting difference.
If so, I think that this book can help. Although one can find dozens of titles on “systems modeling” and “systems thinking,” there remains a clear need for an approachable and inspiring book about systems and us—why we find them at times so baffling and how we can better learn to manage and redesign them.
At the time that Dana was writing Thinking in Systems , she had recently completed the twenty-year update to Limits to Growth, titled Beyond the Limits. She was a Pew Scholar in Conservation and the Environment, was serving on the Committee on Research and Exploration for the National Geographic Society, and she was teaching about systems, environment, and ethics at Dartmouth College. In all aspects of her work, she was immersed in the events of the day. She understood those events to be the outward behavior of often complex systems.
Although Dana’s original manuscript has been edited and restructured, many of the examples you will find in this book are from her first draft in 1993. They may seem a bit dated to you, but in editing her work I chose to keep them because their teachings are as relevant now as they were then. The early 1990s were the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and great shifts in other socialist countries. The North American Free Trade Agreement was newly signed. Iraq’s army invaded Kuwait and then retreated, burning oil fields on the way out. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, and South Africa’s apartheid laws were repealed. Labor leader Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland, and poet Václav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia. The International Panel on Climate Change issued its first assessment report, concluding that “emissions from human activities are substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and that this will enhance the greenhouse effect and result in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.” The UN held a conference in Rio de Janeiro on environment and development.
While traveling to meetings and conferences during this time, Dana read the International Herald Tribune and during a single week found many examples of systems in need of better management or complete redesign. She found them in the newspaper because they are all around us every day. Once you start to see the events of the day as parts of trends, and those trends as symptoms of underlying system structure, you will be able to consider new ways to manage and new ways to live in a world of complex systems. In publishing Dana’s manuscript, I hope to increase the ability of readers to understand and talk about the systems around them and to act for positive change.
I hope this small approachable introduction to systems and how we think about them will be a useful tool in a world that rapidly needs to shift behaviors arising from very complex systems. This is a simple book for and about a complex world. It is a book for those who want to shape a better future.
—DIANA WRIGHT , 2008