📚 Thinking in Systems - Week 7

Re next week’s piece, I was wrong about the appendices etc having anything worth dedicating a week to, I instead want us to talk about this article that I discovered serendipitously a couple of weeks ago: ”Magical systems thinking” which is a critique of systems thinking that contextualises its cultural popularity and its shortcomings. There was a lot in it that has inspired me and I think it’s worthy of inclusion in this book club. PS it’s a biased piece against systems thinking but there’s much to be learned from it. For a bit of lively debate about how much it applies to systems thinking you might also like to check out this twitter thread.

This read like Donella Meadows’ 12 Rules for Life. I quite liked it.

I deeply related to the humility of this passage that any fan of productivity and personal development will find all-too-familiar:

“The truth was, we didn’t even follow our advice. We gave learned lectures on the structure of addiction and could not give up coffee. We knew all about the dynamics of eroding goals and eroded our own jogging programs. We warned against the traps of escalation and shifting the burden and then created them in our own marriages.” (p.167)

I appreciated her first systems thinker’s rules for life:

“Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.”

This passage vibed with the guiding idea of the Philosopher’s Toolkit:

“The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible—part of the job of keeping information streams clear. The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems.” (p.175)

This one hit close to home:

“Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct.” (p.183)

I’ve been feeling…decontextualised. I feel alienated from the world because there’s no group or narrative or cohesive thing that’s knitting me into it. My vast curiosity draws me in too many directions; any one of which would be worth dedicating a life to. But I grow increasingly convinced that I just need to dedicate myself to one. We need to pick a problem and wrestle with it. The core of a paradigm is the exemplar: the problem/solution of the paradigm founder that points the way to the work of future scientists and provides a concrete example of a solution. Knowledge that has a dynamic body and wants to dance rather than vivisected dead knowledge.

And with that, the book was over.

I got a lot out of it. But what I got most out of it, was the confirmation that this too is not my home. This too, is another lampost on the road to wherever it is my inner compass is steering. There was a lot of signal in here, but also a lot of noise. More concluding thoughts to come at the end of next week’s piece, but for now, that’s my closing sense: it was fascinating, but it’s not mine.