Meadows is very powerful at using real life example to explain various aspects of systems dynamics. I will touch on the examples that made the greatest impact on my thinking from Chapters 3&4:
*Resilience: "The ability to bounce back into position after being stretched or pressed." Meadows recalls the effect of injecting dairy cows with bovine growth hormone--temporary increased production at the loss of long term resilience. That analogy fits so many situations involving temporary increased production, and it is ESPECIALLY relevant for food systems. In particular I am recalling the long term failure of the Green Revolution. I've also worked on teams where temporary production was deemed more important than resilience. Those teams had high turnover.
*Self-organizing Systems: Her examples were plentiful and meaningful, but it was the idea that we've been straight-jacketing self-organization in our education system that really haunted me. "Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures....It requires freedom and experimentation, and certain amount of disorder. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers." The idea that a power-struggle exists between the creativity of a child and its educator, a struggle that aims to squash the self-organizing system, scares me. Meadows comforts me by stating that self-organization happens even in the face of repression, and I don't have to look far for examples. Look to Egypt for example....
*Hierarchy: Ecosystems really are the perfect example of hierarchical systems, but I don't think food-chain analogies are appropriate for human systems (but like the ants, maybe they are and I'm just not thinking broadly enough). Meadows seems to agree and states that "to be a highly functional system, hierarchy must balance the welfare, freedoms, and responsibilities of the subsystems and the total system. There must be enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large system goal and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning and self-organizing." What is the "central control" in ecological systems? I might say it's the ultimate desire to pass on one's DNA to the next generation. Meadows states, "If a team member is more interested in personal glory than in the team winning, he or she can cause the team to lose." This seems like a tragic flaw in human systems. Especially political systems. The political party may win, but the real team--the nation will lose in the long run.
*Why systems surprise us: We live in a nonlinear world, and boundaries are artificial. The enormous complexities implicated by those two truths are astounding, but necessary. If we draw the boundaries too narrow, we are surprised when our model fails to capture all the parameters.
*Layers of Limits: I really appreciated the idea of a limiting nutrient only being limiting in a certain context. A change here and there in the system, and whole new situation can erupt. What was limiting, may be abundant--even damaging. Meadows points out that understanding the dynamics of the limits themselves is important. I am interested in finding examples of this in nature/human interactions. I expect they are abundant.
*Ubiquitous delays: This topic scares me, and I recall Beatrice's comment in class that with regards to climate change--we're too late. We may not feel the change now, but that is due to a system delay. As Meadows highlights, "when there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of insight is essential." I hope for my grandchildren's sake it's not too late.
*Bounded rationality: Transitions beyond one's bounded rationality expands "reality" from one's individual perspective. This is why cross-discipline approaches are so vital, and why decision makers need to put themselves and many people's shoes before drawing conclusions.
Nice post, Michelle.
ReplyDelete"I had know idea I was studying systems dynamics the whole time I was modeling population dynamics. Definitely some sort of misconnect." Indeed! How unfortunate...
Self-organizing systems: "education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers." This is also so unfortunate - instead of teaching children to be authentic learners and creative, we force them to conform and in doing so we are undermining their long-term adaptive and resilience capacity.
Hierarchy: This term is used to described nested systems...food chain is somewhat different.
Re: centralization of control - perhaps think of this as the subsystems being aware of the purpose of the system higher in the hierarchy so that subsystems are always able to work and support the whole (i.e., optimization of the whole and not the parts).
"I hope for my grandchildren's sake it's not too late." - I hope so too!