---
id: media/thinking-in-systems
about:
  label: Thinking in Systems
  description: >-
    Donella Meadows's primer on systems thinking, published in 2008 from her
    draft manuscript, on stocks, flows, feedback and the places where a system
    can be changed.
  tags:
    - systems thinking
    - feedback
    - stocks and flows
    - leverage points
    - primer
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Donella H. Meadows
    - Diana Wright (ed.)
  publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
  year: 2008
  isbn: '9781603580557'
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W'
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/donella-meadows
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'Open Library: Thinking in systems'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W'
    - title: 'Open Library: Thinking in systems (Chelsea Green, 2008)'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL17052666M'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
[Meadows](/people/donella-meadows/), one of the authors of The Limits to Growth, wrote this short book to bring systems thinking out of the computer and into ordinary reasoning. The opening chapters cover the basics of stocks, flows and feedback, then a zoo of common system types and why systems work as well as they do. Later chapters work through system traps and opportunities. The book ends with leverage points, the places to intervene in a system, and with living in a world of systems.

Meadows died before the book was finished. Diana Wright of the Sustainability Institute completed and edited it from her draft manuscript, and it was published in 2008.

A digital twin is a systems model with a user interface. Most of the ways twins go wrong are ones this book names: mistaking a stock for a flow, ignoring delays, optimising a part at the expense of the whole.

Cover via Open Library.