Thinking in Systems: International Bestseller

Good book

It's important to look at the world as a series of interconnecting systems, because framing it in such a way gives you a perspective that helps you understand why the world works the way it does. The concepts in the book, applied to reality, make a lot of the behaviors in things like the economy, politics, and even culture make a bit more sense than if you were to just consider them as chaotic messes. It's an important book that all people should read if they want to understand the world better than before.

This primer lays out systems theory basics in a way that is easy to understand and fun to read. I have been going through the bibliography for some further reading.

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As the title suggests, this book is written as a 'primer' into the subject, and it fulfils this function with ease and grace. It has the confident feel and logical evolved structure of a book written by someone who had completely mastered her subject and was well used to introducing these key ideas to her university students. There is a strong emphasis within the book on economic and environmental issues, which suited me well. I presume that the late author held quite progressive environmental views anyway, but systems thinking engenders and illuminates environmental concerns better than any other approach I can think of. The sections on resource depletion are both fascinating and frighteningly realistic. Although the issues and underlying thinking was not necessarily always original to systems thinking, the language (labelling of terms) and often counter-intuitive approach of systems modelling has got a lot to give in these two subjects. Concepts introduced such as information hierarchies and resilience, are both common sense and useful intellectual tools at the same time. "I think of resilience as a plateau upon which the system can play, performing its normal functions in safety. A resilient system has a big plateau, a lot of space over which it can wonder, with gentle, elastic walls that will bounce it back, if it comes near a dangerous edge. As a system loses its resilience, its plateau shrinks, and its protective walls become lower and more rigid, until the system is operating on a knife edge, likely to fall off in one direction or another whenever it makes a move. Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space. One day it does something it has done a hundred times before and crashes."p78 Looking back through it, the structure of this book is also very good as I have mentioned. It progresses in a logical way from the practicalities of systems thinking through to their implications and ends with some quite philosophical themes and advice. As another reviewer has mentioned, the appendix is actually useful in this book for a change, and seems in parts like a list of the key points of the book in a type of student revision notes form. The writing and citations in this book almost seem to suggest an air of bemused condescension on behalf of systems thinkers for their misdirected non systems thinking fellow man and the subsequent mistakes they make. Similar to the airy condescension of free market economists, but more justified and less disproved by recent events. There are many examples given which justify this air of superiority, and it seems to me to be an easy stance to buy into! Systems thinking does seem to contain the right tools for tackling the biggest contemporary problems. Anyone suggest a suitable follow up book on systems thinking? ( preferably one biased towards economics) Very accessible and recommended to all as an enjoyable introduction to this subject.

It is a great read.