Summary of Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows: Part 7

Why Systems Work So Well

• If pushed too far, systems may display previously unobserved behaviors. However, for the most part, they get by quite well. And that’s the beautiful thing about systems: They can work so well that we see harmony in their functioning.
• Think about the properties of highly functional systems that you’re familiar with. Chances are good that you observed at least one of three characteristics: resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy.

Resilience

• Resilience is the ability to bounce back after being pressed or stretched. It’s the ability to recover strength, spirits, or any other good aspect quickly. It’s the measure of a system’s ability to survive and persist in a variable environment.
• Resilience comes from a structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after it’s been greatly disturbed. In other words, a single balancing loop brings a system back to its desired state. But resilience is provided by several of these loops operating through different mechanisms, one kicking in if another fails.
• Resilience isn’t the same as being constant over time. Instead, resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short- or long-term fluctuations may in fact be the normal condition which resilience acts to restore. On the other hand, systems that are constant over time can be unresilient.
• Static stability is something you can see. It’s measured by the variation in the condition of a system over time. Resilience, on the other hand, may be hard to see unless you exceed its limits, damage the balancing loops, or the system structure breaks down.
• But since resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people can sacrifice resilience for a more easily recognizable property such as stability or productivity.

Lack of Resilience

• Many chronic diseases, such as heart disease and cancer, come from the breakdown of resilience mechanisms that repair the body, keep blood vessels flowing without restrictions, or control the removal of old cells.
• Large organizations lose their resilience when feedback mechanisms by which they respond to the environment have to travel through too many layers of delay.
• Resilience is like the amount of space upon which a system can play, performing its functions in safety. A resilient system has a lot of space over which it can wander, with elastic walls that will bounce it back if it comes near a dangerous edge.
• As a system loses resilience, the amount of space upon which it can play decreases, and its protective walls become lower and more rigid. As a result, the system is operating on a knife-edge, likely to fall off in one direction or another when it makes a move.
• Loss of resilience can come as a surprise if the system pays more attention to its play than its playing space. One day it may do something it has done a hundred times before, yet crash.

Solutions

• Awareness of resilience allows you to look for ways to preserve or enhance a system’s own restorative powers.
• This awareness is behind holistic health care that tries not only to cure disease, but also build up a body’s internal resistance. It’s also behind aid programs that do more than give food or money. In addition to this, these programs try to change the circumstances that hinder peoples’ ability to provide their own food or money.

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

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