Dancing With Systems
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Highlights
- Systems thinking leads to another conclusionâhowever, waiting, shining, obvious as soon as we stop being blinded by the illusion of control. It says that there is plenty to do, of a different sort of âdoing.â The future canât be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems canât be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We canât surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We canât impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
- We canât control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!
- Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanityâour rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.
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Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own. Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out.
- You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.
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Defy the disciplines. In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think youâre an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines. To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn fromâwhile not being limited byâeconomists and chemists and psychologists and theologians. You will have to penetrate their jargons, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses. They wonât make it easy for you.