Summary of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows: Part 8

Self-Organization

• The most amazing characteristic of some complex systems is their ability to learn, diversify, create, design and evolve. This ability of a system to make its structure more complex is called self-organization.
• You see self-organization in a profound way whenever a seed sprouts or a baby learns to speak.
• Self-organization is such a common property of living systems that we may take it for granted. If we didn’t take it for granted, we would be struck with awe by the unfolding systems in our world.
• If we weren’t nearly blind to the property of self-organization, we’d do better at encouraging, rather than destroying, the self-organizing capacities of the systems that we’re a part of.

Challenges with Self-Organization

• Like resilience, self-organization is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of short-term productivity or stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical additions to production processes.
• Self-organization produces variety and unpredictability. It’s likely to come up with whole new structures or ways of doing things. It requires freedom, experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder.
• These conditions that encourage self-organization can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. As a result, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children rather than stimulating them. Economic powers may lean toward supporting established, powerful enterprises rather than upstart, new ones. And governments may prefer that their people not be too self-organizing.
• Fortunately, self-organization is such a basic property of living systems that even the most overbearing power structure can never fully stifle it. However, in the name of law and order, self-organization may be suppressed for long periods.
• Out of simple rules of self-organization, enormous, diversifying forms of technology, physical structures, organizations, and cultures can grow.

Hierarchy

• In the process of creating new structures and increasing complexity, one thing that a self-organizing system often generates is hierarchy.
• The parts of the world that we understand are organized in subsystems that are combined into larger subsystems. And these large subsystems are combined into still larger subsystems.
• A cell in your heart is a subsystem of an organ, which is a subsystem of you as an organism. You are a subsystem of a family, which is a subsystem of a city, and then a nation, and then the whole global socioeconomic system.
• This arrangement of systems organized in such a way as to create a larger system, or subsystems within systems, is called a hierarchy.
• Corporate systems, military systems, economic systems, and living organisms are arranged in hierarchies.
• If subsystems can largely take care of themselves, yet serve the needs of the larger system, while the larger system coordinates and enhances the functioning of the subsystems, then a stable, resilient, and efficient structure results.
• Complex systems can only evolve from simple systems if there are stable intermediate forms. And the resulting forms will naturally be hierarchic.
• Hierarchies are brilliant systems inventions. And this is not only because they give a system stability and resilience, but also because they reduce the amount of information that any part of the system must keep track of.

Relationships in Hierarchies

• In hierarchical systems, relationships within each subsystem are stronger than relationships between subsystems. Everything is still connected to everything else, but not as strongly.
• For instance, people in the same department talk to each other more than they talk to people other departments.
• But if these information links within and between each level of the hierarchy are designed correctly, feedback delays are limited. No level is overwhelmed with information, and the system works with efficiency and resilience.
• Hierarchical systems can be taken apart. And much can be learned by taking apart systems at different hierarchical levels and studying them separately. For instance, cells or organs are good examples. So, the reductionist dissection of regular science can teach us a lot.
• However, it’s important not to lose sight of the relationships that link each subsystem to the others and to the higher levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you may be surprised.
• What you need to focus on may change over time, as self-organizing systems evolve new degrees of hierarchies and integration.
• You can watch self-organizing systems form hierarchies. For instance, a self-employed person gets a lot of work and hires some employees.
• Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up. In other words, they develop from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organism, from individual player to team, and from actual production to the management of production.

Hierarchy and Purpose

• The purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.
• Unfortunately, this is something that both the higher and lower levels of a hierarchy can easily forget. As a result, some systems aren’t meeting their goals because of broken hierarchies.
• For instance, if a team member is more interested in personal glory than in the team winning, this person can cause the team to lose. If a body cell breaks free from its normal hierarchical function and starts multiplying wildly, it’s called cancer.
• If students think their only purpose is to get the best grades instead of actually gaining knowledge, cheating and other counterproductive behaviors break out. If one company bribes the government to favor that company, the advantages of a competitive market are lost.
• When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goal, the resulting behavior is called suboptimazation.

Balance

• Just as damaging as suboptimization, however, is the problem of too much control. If the rules prevent students and faculty from exploring fields of knowledge freely, the purpose of the university is not achieved. Or the coach might interfere with the on-the-spot judgments of a good player, to the detriment of the team.
• To be a highly functional team, hierarchy must balance the freedoms and responsibilities of the subsystems and total system. In other words, there must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large-system goal. And there also must be enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing and self-organizing.
• Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons why systems can work so well. Promoting and managing for these properties can improve a system’s ability to function well over the long term and be sustainable.

If you’d like to review, here are parts one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven of this summary.

To get your own physical copy of Thinking in Systems, click here. For the Kindle version, click here. Or, to get a free copy of the audiobook with a 30-day standard trial, click here.