# Systems Thinking ## The Idea in Brief Systems thinking is seeing the world as interconnected stocks, flows, and feedback loops rather than isolated events or linear cause-and-effect chains. Once you learn to see systems, you can't unsee them. Every delay, oscillation, and overshoot starts to make sense—and you stop blaming individuals for failures that are actually structural. --- ## Key Concepts ### Stocks and Flows A stock is anything that accumulates—money, trust, inventory, morale. Flows are what fill or drain them. Stocks change slowly, even when flows change suddenly. This is why systems resist change and overshoot targets. You can't instantly rebuild trust or drain a reservoir. ### Feedback Loops Two types matter. **Balancing loops** push toward equilibrium (a thermostat keeping temperature steady). **Reinforcing loops** drive exponential growth or collapse (compound interest, viral spread, vicious cycles). Most real systems have both competing. Whichever loop dominates at a given moment determines the behaviour. ### Delays Delays are everywhere and brutally important. They determine how fast systems react, how accurately they hit targets, and whether they oscillate or overshoot. Overshoots, oscillations, and collapses are always caused by delays. The counterintuitive fix is often to react slower, not faster—smoothing out response to avoid amplifying noise. ### Leverage Points Donella Meadows' hierarchy: most effort goes into changing numbers (budgets, targets, headcount). Most leverage sits in changing goals, information flows, and the mental models that created the system. The highest leverage of all is recognising that the paradigm itself is just one way of seeing. ### Bounded Rationality People make reasonable decisions based on incomplete information about distant parts of the system. The fisherman isn't greedy—he just can't see the aggregate effect. Widen the information boundaries and behaviour changes. Most "irrational" behaviour is rational within its local context. --- ## Implications **In diagnosis:** Stop blaming individuals for systemic failures. The structure of the system produces the behaviour. Change the structure, change the behaviour. **In intervention:** Missing information is a systems crime. Restoring information flows is often the cheapest, most powerful intervention—much easier than rebuilding physical infrastructure. **In design:** Once a physical structure exists, your leverage shrinks to using it efficiently. The real leverage was in the design. This applies to organisations, supply chains, and habits. **In boundaries:** Every model draws boundaries around what's "inside" the system. Those boundaries are choices, not facts. The skill is recognising when your boundaries are causing you to miss something important. --- ## Sources - [[Thinking in Systems]] — Meadows' foundational guide to stocks, flows, feedback loops, and leverage points - [[The Fifth Discipline]] — Senge on learning organisations and systems archetypes - [[Systemantics]] — Gall's cynical take on system behaviour and emergent dysfunction - [[The Unaccountability Machine]] — Dan Davies on how systems resist control and produce unintended outcomes - [[Making Sense of Chaos]] — Complexity economics as stocks, flows, and emergence at scale - [[Dead Companies Walking]] — Pattern recognition across failing companies reveals systemic causes - [[Storm In A Teacup]] — Physical systems thinking applied to everyday phenomena - [[Alchemy]] — Rory Sutherland on psycho-logical systems that defy linear analysis --- ## See in Notes - [Decision Architecture](https://www.anishpatel.co/decision-architecture/) — Strategy as hypothesis, measurement as decision design: treating the organisation as a learning system - [Capacity and Flow](https://www.anishpatel.co/capacity-and-flow/) — Flow as system property: WIP discipline, feedback loops, and why adding headcount often makes things worse - [How Decisions Compound](https://www.anishpatel.co/how-decisions-compound/) — The learning loop: four questions asked continuously turn decisions into compounding advantage - [The Execution Trap](https://www.anishpatel.co/the-execution-trap/) — Execution problems are system problems: decision latency, queue overload, starting bias - [Inverse Response](https://www.anishpatel.co/inverse-response/) — Some systems move the wrong way first; the discipline of holding steady through the dip - [Unstable by Design](https://www.anishpatel.co/unstable-by-design/) — Match your response speed to your system's instability - [Pace Layers](https://www.anishpatel.co/pace-layers/) — Different parts of a system change at different speeds; respect the rhythm - [Limits to Growth](https://www.anishpatel.co/limits-to-growth/) — Churn as a balancing feedback loop that caps growth - [Variance](https://www.anishpatel.co/variance/) — Not all variation requires action; knowing when to react is half of operational judgement