book · draft
Thinking in Systems
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.
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.
- authors
- Donella H. Meadows, Diana Wright (ed.)
- publisher
- Chelsea Green Publishing
- year
- 2008
- isbn
- 9781603580557
- url
- https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737036W
produced by this organization or person
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American environmental scientist (1941 to 2001), lead author of The Limits to Growth and of Thinking in Systems, known for her list of leverage points.
cited by
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Two words for the world's crises taken together: what each means, who uses them, and the few places they touch the modelling of places.
Tags: systems thinking, feedback, stocks and flows, leverage points, primer