This video animation, Money as Debt by Paul Grignon, is undoubtedly one the most important films ever made.

If you don’t yet understand why money is such a big problem, WATCH THIS VIDEO.

Please help spread this video far and wide.

I’ve embedded it here, but you can watch and download it on Google Video too.

Further introductory reading

• Ecology of Money and Short Circuit by Richard Douthwaite
• Community Currency Guide (pdf) by Bernard Lietaer and Gwendolyn Hallsmith
• Interest and Inflation Free Money by Margrit Kennedy
• Extract of Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender (pdf) by Tom Greco
• Draft of Healthy Money Healthy Planet:Developing Sustainability through new Money Systems by Deirdre Kent
• Chapter One of Grip of Death (literal meaning of mortgage) by Michael Rowbotham
• Money Debt and Banks essay by Richard Greeves, Dr. John Courtneidge and David Soori
• Openmoney.info and the Open Money Manifesto by Michael Linton and friends
• The inspirational article A Tale of Two Ecovillages by Jonathan Dawson, that looks at Damanhur’s Credito currency and Findhorn’s Eko

Some of the many examples of successful alternatives to the Money as Debt madness:

• Bartercard
• The Totnes Pound
• Berkshares
• Toronto Dollar
• Salt Spring Dollars
• Ithaca Hours
• WIR Bank – Economic Circle Co-operative that has been running in Switzerland since 1934
• Damanhur’s Credito
• Findhorn’s Eko

See also:

• Timebanks.org
• Time Banks UK
• The LETSystem Design Manual
• LETS Link UK
• The ccSyndicator
• Complementary Currency Resource Center
• The Workgroup on Solidarity Socio-Economy’s sub-site on Social Money
• Interra Project
• LOADs more really good money links can be found via all the sites above, here, here, here and here

Again, please help to spread this video and information far and wide.

Thank you.

Further reading:

• a_changing_money_system.pdf by Margrit Kennedy
• Beyond Greed and Scarcity.pdf – an interview with Bernard Lietaer by Sarah van Gelder, editor of YES!: A journal of positive futures.
• breadhoursnewsletter.pdf – a nice newsletter from the now defunct www.breadhours.org (anyone know what happened?)
• ccClearingHouse.pdf – a proposal for an “Internet-based clearing system that would enable complementary currencies of different types from anywhere in the world to be exchanged among themselves. It would be an important next step to empower the complementary currency movement.”
• Comment on the Wörgl Experiment with Community Currency and Demurrage.pdf by Thomas H Greco, Jr.
• Community Currencies in Japan.pdf by Yasuyuki Hirota
• community currency for solving social issues.pdf by Akio Doteuchi
• Community_Currency_Guide.pdf – an excellent guide by Bernard Lietaer and Gwendolyn Hallsmith
• Community_Exchange_Systems_screen.pdf – a Community Exchange Systems in Asia, Africa & Latin America newsletter from 2002
• Complementary currency systems and the new economic paradigm.pdf by Stephen DeMeulenaere for Strohalm Foundation
• decentralizedcurrency.pdf – Money as IOUs in a Social Trust Network and A Proposal for a Secure, Private, Decentralized Digital Currency Protocol by Ryan Fugger, founder of Ripplepay,com
• FEASTA Proposals 4 Gobal Monetary Reform.pdf by Feasta: The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
• How to Build Healthy Community Economics.pdf – a presentation by Thomas H Greco, Jr.
• InternationalExperienceInCommunityCurrencies.PDF by Gill Seyfang and Ruth Pearson
• interraproj.pdf – an introduction to the Interra Project
• InWhoseInterest.pdf – an article by Mark Kinney for http://www.terratrc.org/
• Islamic Banking and its Importance in the Emergence of Economic Democracy.pdf by Thomas H Greco, Jr.
• keeping_the_gp_away.pdf – a nef (new economics foundation) briefing about community time banks and health
• local_currencies_catalysts.pdf – “Local Currencies: Catalysts for Sustainable Regional Economies” by Robert Swann and Susan Witt
• Local Currencies in European History.pdf by Jerome Blanc for LEFI
• MoneyABriefHistoryDeeHock.pdf – “Money – A Brief History” by Dee Hock, founder of VISA
• money debt and banks.pdf by Richard Greeves, Dr. John Courtneidge and David Soori
• money_guide.pdf – United Diversity’s Money Guide
• pictorial_history_of_CCS.pdf by Stephen DeMeulenaere
• Plugging the Leaks – Handbook.pdf – Making the most of every pound that enters your local economy, published by nef
• Presentation of Tucson Traders for the Forum Social Money.pdf by Thomas H Greco, Jr.
• Public Involvement in Health-Timebanks.pdf by nef
• Report of the Worldwide Database of Complementary Currency Systems 06.pdf by Stephen DeMeulenaere
• Setting Up a Credit Union.pdf from the Association of British Credit Unions Ltd
• Social_Money_as_a_Lever_for_the_New_Economic_Paradigm.pdf, summarised by Heloisa Primavera
• Social Money the experience of Friendly Favors.pdf by Sergio Lub
• Social money – Well timed permanence or break from normality.pdf by Heloisa Primavera
• The SANE Community Exchange System.pdf by Tim Jenkin
• the_time_of_our_lives.pdf – Research findings about Time Banks in the UK, by Gill Seyfang
• Time Banking – A briefing.pdf by nef
• Time Banks – A Radical Manifesto for the UK.pdf by nef
• Time Banks in the UK-Building Sustainable Communities.pdf by Gill Seyfang
• Wealth money and power.pdf by Heloisa Primavera
• What is a credit union flyer.pdf by ABCUL

On google video

As a youtube playlist

Each day Gloria will a post about an inspirational person, and I’ll highlight an inspirational project. Her first person is Maya Angelou, and my first project is…

Transition Towns
The Transition Towns project was initiated by permaculture teacher of 10 years, Rob Hopkins.

Focussing on the central issues of peak oil and climate change, Transition Towns are “towns that are participating in the transition to a more localised post-peak-oil future”.

This process normally involves going through the following 10 steps (now 12 steps, see here):

1. Raise awareness of peak oil and climate change (often by showing films like The End of Suburbia and An Inconvenient Truth)
2. Lay the Foundations. This is about networking with existing groups and activists and stressing that this Transition Town initiative is not a process of duplicating their work but of requesting their input in a new way of looking at the future.
3. The Official Unleashing. The aim of this event is to generate a momentum which will propel your initiative forward for the next period of its work.
4. Form Groups. You can’t do this on your own. Part of the process of developing an Energy Descent Action Plan is that of tapping into the collective genius of the community. One of the most effective ways to do this is to set up a number of smaller groups to focus on specific aspects of the process.
5. Use Open Space. Open Space Technology is an extraordinary tool. It has been described as ‘a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and a powerful way to lead any kind of organization, in everyday practice and ongoing change’.
6. Develop Visible Practical Manifestations of the Project. It is easy to come up with ideas, harder to get practical things happening on the ground. It is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. Your project needs, from an early stage, to begin to create practical manifestations in the town, high visibility signals that it means business.
7. Facilitate The Great Reskilling. Very few people still have the skills a more resilient society needs. This is where your Transition Town initiative comes in.
8. Build a Bridge to Local Government. Whatever the degree of groundswell your Transition Town initiative manages to generate, however many practical projects you manage to get going on the ground and however wonderful your Energy Descent Plan is, you will not progress too far unless you have cultivated a positive and productive relationship with your local authority.
9. Honour the Elders. There is a great deal that we can learn from those who directly remember the transition to the age of cheap oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960.
10. Let it Go Where It Wants to Go and Reflections….In essence, although you may start out developing your Transition Town process with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. You need to be open to it going where the energy of those who get involved want to take it. If you try and hold onto the idea that it will be a certain way it will, after a while, begin to sap the energy that is building to do certain things. It is what is so exciting about the whole thing, seeing what emerges.

So there you have it. Transition Towns (of which there are now many) are very inspiring projects.

For more info check out Rob Hopkin’s blog Transition Culture, these excellent articles on Treehugger, and have a read through the Transition Initiatives Primer (pdf) and the Kinsale Energy Decent Action Plan (pdf)

Also, check out this short video from Transition Town Lewes:

I strongly encourage you to watch them too. Its great stuff!

You should also buy the book:

[amtap book:isbn=1887208070]

UPDATE: The book in bullet points from David Korten’s new site:

An 2 minute excerpt from David Korten’s (author of “When Corporations Rule the World) inspiring and lavishly-illustrated presentation of his new book “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community“:

A full-length DVD of this presentation is available at http://www.peakmoment.tv

David Korten on “The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community” at the Veterans for Peace 2006 National Convention in Seattle:

A 2.5 minute mash-up:

The full 30 minute presentation:

More
Peak Moment 48: A 28 minute interview with David Korten. The planet is quickly confronting us with limits to the exploitative, dominator system of the past 5000 years. David Korten implores us to replace dominator-control stories with new stories — affirming life values of cooperation, community and interdependence.

Introduction

The Commons Creation Collective is all about harnessing the wealth and power of our networks and working together to raising funds and awareness.

It will initially bring together conscious event organisers, radial media publishers, and their supporters, to collaborate on two complementary projects:

1. The Commons Creation Fund
   Lots of people contributing a minimum of £5 a month into a common fund and deciding together how to best to invest it in shared infrastructure. Purpose: to create a commons; a pool of collectively owned/ shared resources (thereby building the foundations for a scaleable community banking and exchange system).
2. The Commons Creation Flyer
   A regular A3 (folded to A6) flyer, distributed by members, that encourages people to become a member of the collective (i.e. contribute £5 a month, help distribute flyer, promote the collective), give details of all the events organised by members, and links to news and issues they deem important.Purpose: to ensure the success of the Commons Creation Fund, and to inform as many people as possible about all events organised by members, and all the news/issues they deem important.

So, what’s the deal?

INDIVIDUALS

To become a member of the Commons Creation Collective, individuals agree to:

• Contribute a minimum of £5 per month to the Commons Creation Fund
• Help distribute the Commons Creation Flyer/ promote the Commons Creation Collective (this can be as simple as inviting friends and forwarding e-mails, or getting involved with day to day admin jobs etc.)

In return, members:

• Become shared owners of The Commons, our pool of collectively owned/shared resouces
• Decide together (using Dotmocracy?) how best to spend the money contributed to the Commons Creation Fund
• Are kept informed about all the latest news and events relevant to the collective
• Can submit and rate news, events and short articles to be included on the flyer
• Get FREE entrance to exclusive member gatherings and parties
• Get discounts from other members of the collective (eg. concessionary ticket prices, cheap books, CDs etc)
• Get fair access to use of the resources in The Commons (obviously, you own them)
• Get connected to other people and groups who share similar values and/or are interested in the same things (all the other members and the wonderful people you’ll meet at member events)

GROUPS

If a conscious event/radical publisher/other group wants to get involved they agree:

• To put a link to commonscreation.org on their website
• To put a link to commonscreation.org on all their flyers/mailouts/publications
• To offer discouts and/or special offers to members of the collective

In return, groups will get:

• A profile on commonscreation.org highlighting all the good work the groups does, including details about how to get involved and links back to their own site etc.
• Details of all events organised by the group included on the Commons Creation Flyer
• A link to the group’s website on all copies of the Commons Creation Flyer
• Additionally, and perhaps most significantly, groups will gain discounted access to and use of the resources held in The Commons (eg. web experts, CD burners, printers, vans, lighting rigs, staging, land, venues, etc.)

Who needs to be involved?

Event Organisers:

• uniteddiversity – signed up!
  Josef, Oli, Tom
• Peace Not War – signed up!
  Mudge, Katie, Rob, Sarah, Katie, Fidel, etc.
• One Taste – signed up!
  Dannii, Jamie
• The Synergy Project – signed up!
  Dom, Gian, Daniel, Alex, Rowly, etc.
• Movimientos – signed up!
• Neo-Dogma-Non – signed up!
  
• Creative Forum
  Alan, Teresa, Shane, Gareth etc.
• Art Music Politic
  Will etc.
• Guerilla Zoo
  James etc.
• Small World Solar Stage
  Pony, Emma, etc.
• The Synergy Centre
  Steve, Matt, Jo, etc.
• Kingston Green Fair
  Bernadette, Des, etc.
• NODE London
• Big Green Gathering
• Sunrise Celebration
  Daniel etc.
  
• Buttercuts
  Andy etc.
• Raison d’etre
  Yvan, Crystal
• Needle and Thread
  Len etc.
• Signs of Life
• Crystal Field
  Enoch etc.
• Sangita Sounds
  Darren etc.
• Planet Angel
  Pete, Angel, etc.
• etc.

Radical Media Publishers and Bloggers

• Red Pepper
• Bulb Magazine
• Resurgence
• Undercurrents
• Peace News
• Green Events
• City Hippy – signed up!
• Shorno.net
• Leighton Cooke
• Ceridwen Devi
• Indymedia
• i-conscious
• germination
• contaminant media
• media venture collective
• etc.

How will it be financed?

The aim is for the whole thing to be self-financed by member contributions (we encourage those who can afford to contribute more than £5 a month to do so). Some seed funding will also be sought, but there is nothing stopping a group of co-operatively minded people from pooling £5+ a month straight away.

Next Steps:

• Gather some of the people who need to be involved and get agreement on the above (or at least something very similar to what is outlined above)
• On the back of this initial agreement, get more of the people who need to be involved signed-up, whilst also working on the initial website and flyer

APPENDIX
Suggested Initial SMART Goals/Objectives (specific, measurable, acheivable, realistic, time-based)

• Get first version of http://commonscreation.org up (a nicely designed site explaining the idea, who the existing members are, how and why to join, etc.) no later than one month after getting initial agreement from some of the people who need to be involved.
• Design and produce the first version of the flyer no later than one month after getting initial agreement from some of the people who need to be involved. Start to distribute flyers.
• Get 400 members to sign-up and start contributing £5 a month by December 31st, 2006.
• Hold a monthly member’s gatherings (meal and jam session), starting no later than Januray, 2007.

Suggestions about where to put/invest money

• La Base – “Some seek to destroy the pyramid by taking the power of the top. La Base creates by giving power to the base. When the base rises, a new structure rises with it.”
  

  What is La Base
  La Base is rooted in the idea that real democracy and human rights can only be meaningful when accompanied by economic rights and autonomy.

  La Base is not an organization, but a fund of productive capital owned in common. Access to this resource is universal but entails an obligation to ensure its sustainability for all, now and in the future. Those who use La Base are free to create their world as they will.

  La Base’s resources are currently used as fair loans to individuals to help them pursue their economic independence in democratic collectives. Loan repayments go back to the common fund to be used by others. To learn more about loans and other practical applications of La Base, please see the actions.

• Rootstock – “supporting co-operatives working for social change”
  

  Rootstock is a social investment society set up as an initiative of the Radical Routes network of co-operatives. Radical Routes is a growing network of housing and workers’ co-operatives working for social change.

  Radical Routes co-operatives are active in many fields, including:

  Sustainable land use through permaculture, land restoration, woodland creation, and growing and distributing organic food.

  Communal housing – co-operatively owned housing is a resource for the whole community rather than a commodity for the profit of a few.

  Resource centres for communities

  Information through publications, radical bookshops and practical support for new co-ops.

  Campaigning on issues such as ecological preservation, animal rights and housing.

  International peace work

  Home education

  Electrical, plumbing and small scale building work

  Support services including Book keeping and accountancy, Computer services, Training and consultancy, Mediation and group working

• Triodos – Europe’s leading ethical bank that only finances projects wtih affect positive social, environmental and cultural change.
  
• Ecology Building Society – a mutual building society dedicated to improving the environment by promoting sustainable housing and sustainable communities.
• London Rebuilding Society and other CDFI’s (Community Development Finance Institutions)

Renga Platform Poetry A renga is a series of short verses linked into one long poem, composed collaboratively by a group. It is a wonderful, reflective experience which draws inspiration from the seasons and our changing relationships with the natural world. We will be writing a Nijuin (20 verse) renga which takes a day to write. Join Artists Alex Finlay and Anne-Marie Culhane for an interdependent poem, people are invited to come and join the group to write or listen. www.renga-platform.co.uk The future of sustainable energy Film screenings and displays by the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. www.ashdenawards.org ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ All day durational art work, engraving onto the outside of a car images of the 150 million year old plant and animals that contributed to the crude oil that runs the combustion engines that threaten us with yet more extinctions. Create the ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ Artwork with Benedict Philips, www.thebenedict.net The Clothes She Wears A clothes installation from women around the globe, with background narratives displayed on hangers. Electronic waste exhibition Follow the circuits of disposal with the Electronic Waste Exhibition by Jennifer Gabrys, A series of informative graphics on the resource paths of electronics and electronic waste. www.signalspace.net Dirt Cafe The Dirt Cafe starts off with a meal and a discussion in a provocative environment. It is an evolving project, that offers evidence of how collaboration and imagination can be applied to reveal alternative scenarios, encourage joined-up thinking and include sensory, social and ethical engagement. www.dirtcafe.com. Click here to view a copy of the Dirt Cafe image. Doctor’s Surgery Join the Open University ‘doctors’ to help write prescriptions for a more equitable world. See this exciting new research at the Open University’s geography department, www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/geography/ Proboscis Investigate cultures of listening with Proboscis www.proboscis.org.uk Human Echoes: a dialogue on cultures of listening Human Echoes: a half day dialogue on cultures of listening is the first stage of Proboscis’ Human Echoes project and will bring together a group of 15 experts from the arts, civil society organisations and academia. Proboscis has also commissioned artist Camilla Brueton to make a new work in response to the dialogue. The aim of the event is to draw out what it means to create ‘cultures of listening’, generating a set of ideas about how cultures of listening enable knowledge mapping and sharing and how that in turn can help people address concepts of interdependence in ways that are relevant to our lives. During the afternoon Proboscis will be showing the Social Tapestries and Diffusion projects and their recent publications along with its short films Annotating the City 6mins and Topographies and Tales (work in progress) 20 mins. Members of the public attending the afternoons activities will be invited to share their thoughts on cultures of listening, building a body of knowledge and stories on the subject throughout the afternoon. Earthly Sins Confessional The Earthly Sins Confessional booth is a non-judgemental environmental advice installation, that was created by Futerra and Anti-Apathy to offer a different kind of ‘Enlightenment’. After confessing your ecological sins, you will be asked to take a pledge – three simple lifestyle changes that will help to relieve guilt and kick start the path to a cleaner more equitable world. www.earthlysins.org One World Declare you interdependence in One World, a network organisation working for sustainable development through information and communication, www.oneworld.net D-Fuse Join International artists and designers, D-Fuse in the Communication Session www.dfuse.com. D-Fuse Info Pack. D-Fuse Outline.

To view the programme information in pdf format click here

Technorati Tags: events, interdependence, politics, nef, partners

By Donella Meadows

(Whole Earth Winter 2001)

Quick Summary of Points.

1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. 10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

Introduction

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can’t optimize; we don’t even know what to optimize. We can’t keep track of everything. We can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion, however; 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 “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t 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 can’t 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 can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

But there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity; our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

I will summarize the most general “systems wisdoms” I have absorbed from modeling complex systems and hanging out with modelers. These are the take-home lessons, the concepts and practices that penetrate the discipline of systems so deeply that one begins, however imperfectly, to practice them not just in one’s profession, but in all of life.

The list probably isn’t complete, because I am still a student in the school of systems. And it isn’t unique to systems thinking. There are many ways to learn to dance. But here, as a start-off dancing lesson, are the practices I see my colleagues adopting, consciously or unconsciously, as they encounter systems.

Get the beat.

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. Peoples’ memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.

Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing; the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too. I have been told with great authority that milk price was going up when it was going down, that real interest rates were falling when they were rising, that the deficit was a higher fraction of the GNP than ever before when it wasn’t.

Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static analysis; not only to “what’s wrong?” but also to “how did we get there?” and “what behavior modes are possible?” and “if we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?”

And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. (The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?)

Listen to the wisdom of the system.

Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Don’t be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

A friend of mine, Nathan Gray, was once an aid worker in Guatemala. He told me of his frustration with agencies that would arrive with the intention of “creating jobs” and “increasing entrepreneurial abilities” and “attracting outside investors.” They would walk right past the thriving local market, where small-scale business people of all kinds, from basket-makers to vegetable growers to butchers to candy sellers, were displaying their entrepreneurial abilities in jobs they had created for themselves. Nathan spent his time talking to the people in the market, asking about their lives and businesses, learning what was in the way of those businesses expanding and incomes rising. He concluded that what was needed was not outside investors, but inside ones. Small loans available at reasonable interest rates, and classes in literacy and accounting, would produce much more long-term good for the community than bringing in a factory or assembly plant from outside.

Expose your mental models to the open air.

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. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption with which you might have confused your own identity.

You don’t have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, though that’s a good discipline. You can do it with words or lists or pictures or arrows showing what you think is connected to what. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility (the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure) is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

Stay humble. Stay a learner.

Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring-out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know.

The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment, or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.” It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors.

Honor and protect information.

A decision-maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information.

If I could, I would add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, accurate, and complete information.

For example, in 1986 new federal legislation required US companies to report all chemical emissions from each of their plants. Through the Freedom of Information Act (from a systems point of view one of the most important laws in the nation) that information became a matter of public record. In July 1988 the first data on chemical emissions became available. The reported emissions were not illegal, but they didn’t look very good when they were published in local papers by enterprising reporters, who had a tendency to make lists of “the top ten local polluters.” That’s all that happened. There were no lawsuits, no required reductions, no fines, no penalties. But within two years chemical emissions nationwide (as least as reported, and presumably also in fact) had decreased by 40 percent. Some companies were launching policies to bring their emissions down by 90 percent, just because of the release of previously sequestered information.

Locate responsibility in the system.

Look for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside events can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down incidences of infectious disease). But sometimes they can’t. And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system.

“Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.

Dartmouth College reduced intrinsic responsibility when it took thermostats out of individual offices and classrooms and put temperature-control decisions under the guidance of a central computer. That was done as an energy-saving measure. My observation from a low level in the hierarchy is that the main consequence was greater oscillations in room temperature. When my office gets overheated now, instead of turning down the thermostat, I have to call an office across campus, which gets around to making corrections over a period of hours or days, and which often overcorrects, setting up the need for another phone call. One way of making that system more, rather than less, responsible, might have been to let professors keep control of their own thermostats and charge them directly for the amount of energy they use. (Thereby privatizing a commons!)

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipe downstream from their outflow pipe. It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt. It could mean Congress would no longer be allowed to legislate rules from which it exempts itself.

Make feedback policies for feedback systems.

President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback.

He suggested, at a time when oil imports were soaring, that there be a tax on gasoline proportional to the fraction of US oil consumption that had to be imported. If imports continued to rise the tax would rise, until it suppressed demand and brought forth substitutes and reduced imports. If imports fell to zero, the tax would fall to zero.

The tax never got passed.

Carter was also trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the US and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped.

That never happened either.

You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops; loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process.

Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.

Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.

If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass. Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can precisely? define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can precisely? define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

Go for the good of the whole.

Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. As Kenneth Boulding once said, don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability; whether they are easily measured or not.

As you think about a system, spend part of your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system, not just the problem that may have drawn you to focus on the system to begin with. And realize that, especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the system. It helps to remember that the parts of a system cannot survive without the whole. The long-term interests of your liver require the long-term health of your body, and the long-term interests of sawmills require the long-term health of forests.

Expand time horizons.

The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. The time horizon of most families still extends farther than that; through the lifetimes of children or grandchildren. Many Native American cultures actively spoke of and considered in their decisions the effects upon the seventh generation to come. The longer the operant time horizon, the better the chances for survival.

In the strict systems sense there is no long-term/short-term distinction. Phenomena at different timescales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago.

When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and long terms; the whole system.

Expand thought horizons.

Defy the disciplines. In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re 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 from (while not being limited by) economists 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 won’t make it easy for you.

Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. 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. They will have to go into learning mode, to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.

It can be done. It’s very exciting when it happens.

Expand the boundary of caring.

Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.

As with everything else about systems, most people already know the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe what they know.

Celebrate complexity.

Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.

There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems. Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us.

Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. Just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are Not News. They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can’t expect everyone to behave like that.

And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly, amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love.

We know what to do about eroding goals. Don’t weigh the bad news more heavily than the good. And keep standards absolute.

This is quite a list. Systems thinking can only tell us to do these things. It can’t do them for us. And so we are brought to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap. But it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond; to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

Donella Meadows died in the spring of 2001. This article was excerpted from the manuscript of her unfinished last book.

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally production ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of stable social order. – Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual

There are three main ingredients to permaculture.

1. Shared ethics of “earth care”, “people care” and “fair shares”(which is shorthand for limits to populations and consumption, and the fair distribution of resources to further the work of earth care and people care.) Permaculture also stresses the importance of taking personal responsibility for our actions.
2. Ecological principles derived by the observation of natural systems, by ecologists such as Birch and Odum.
3. Design tools and processes that allow an individual or group to assemble conceptual, material and strategic components into a “pattern” or “plan of action”, that can be implemented and maintained with minimal resources.

Summary of Permaculture Principles

1. Observe and Interact – Observation is interaction and Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
2. Catch and Store Energy – make hay while the sun shines
3. Obtain a Yield – You can’t work on an empty stomach
4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback – Take Personal Responsibility
5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services – Nature knows best
6. Produce No Waste – Waste not – want not
7. Design from Patterns to Details – Don’t reinvent the wheel and See the forest before the trees
8. Integrate rather than Segregate – Together We Achieve More
9. Use Small and Slow Solutions – Small is beautiful, slow is sane and Slow and steady wins the race
10. Use and Value Diversity – Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and The key to intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces
11. Use Edges and Value the Marginal – The action is at the edge
12. Use and Respond to Change Creatively – Everything evolves, is succeeded but comes around (again)

The Dance

1. Get the beat.
2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.
3. Expose your mental models to the open air.
4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.
5. Honor and protect information.
6. Locate responsibility in the system.
7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.
8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.
9. Go for the good of the whole.
10. Expand time horizons.
11. Expand thought horizons.
12. Expand the boundary of caring.
13. Celebrate complexity.
14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mindset of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

I assumed that at first too. We all assumed it, as eager systems students at the great institution called MIT. More or less innocently, enchanted by what we could see through our new lens, we did what many discoverers do. We exaggerated our own ability to change the world. We did so not with any intent to deceive others, but in the expression of our own expectations and hopes. Systems thinking for us was more than subtle, complicated mindplay. It was going to Make Systems Work.

But self-organizing, nonlinear, feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable. They are understandable only in the most general way. The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. The idea of making a complex system do just what you want it to do can be achieved only temporarily, at best. We can never fully understand our world, not in the way our reductionistic science has led us to expect. Our science itself, from quantum theory to the mathematics of chaos, leads us into irreducible uncertainty. For any objective other than the most trivial, we can’t optimize; we don’t even know what to optimize. We can’t keep track of everything. We can’t find a proper, sustainable relationship to nature, each other, or the institutions we create, if we try to do it from the role of omniscient conqueror.

For those who stake their identity on the role of omniscient conqueror, the uncertainty exposed by systems thinking is hard to take. If you can’t understand, predict, and control, what is there to do?

Systems thinking leads to another conclusion–however, 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 “doing.” The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t 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 can’t 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 can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide-awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

But there it was, the message emerging from every computer model we made. Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity–our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.

I will summarize the most general “systems wisdom” I have absorbed from modeling complex systems and from hanging out with modelers. These are the take-home lessons, the concepts and practices that penetrate the discipline of systems so deeply that one begins, however imperfectly, to practice them not just in one’s profession, but in all of life.

The list probably isn’t complete, because I am still a student in the school of systems. And it isn’t unique to systems thinking. There are many ways to learn to dance. But here, as a start-off dancing lesson, are the practices I see my colleagues adopting, consciously or unconsciously, as they encounter systems.

1. Get the beat.

Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. If possible, find or make a time graph of actual data from the system. Peoples’ memories are not always reliable when it comes to timing.

Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing–the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too. I have been told with great authority that milk price was going up when it was going down, that real interest rates were falling when they were rising, that the deficit was a higher fraction of the GNP than ever before when it wasn’t.

Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static analysis–not only to “what’s wrong?” but also to “how did we get there?” and “what behavior modes are possible?” and “if we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?”

And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. (The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town?)

2. Listen to the wisdom of the system.

Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Don’t be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

A friend of mine, Nathan Gray, was once an aid worker in Guatemala. He told me of his frustration with agencies that would arrive with the intention of “creating jobs” and “increasing entrepreneurial abilities” and “attracting outside investors”. They would walk right past the thriving local market, where small-scale business people of all kinds, from basket-makers to vegetable growers to butchers to candy-sellers, were displaying their entrepreneurial abilities in jobs they had created for themselves. Nathan spent his time talking to the people in the market, asking about their lives and businesses, learning what was in the way of those businesses expanding and incomes rising. He concluded that what was needed was not outside investors, but inside ones. Small loans available at reasonable interest rates, and classes in literacy and accounting, would produce much more long-term good for the community than bringing in a factory or assembly plant from outside.

3. Expose your mental models to the open air.

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. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption with which you might have confused your own identity.

You don’t have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, though that’s a good discipline. You can do it with words or lists or pictures or arrows showing what you think is connected to what. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility–the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure — is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

4. Stay humble. Stay a learner.

Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring-out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know.

The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment–or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes. What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more about where it’s leading.

That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.” It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors.

5. Honor and protect information.

A decision maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information.

If I could, I would add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.

For example, in 1986 new federal legislation required U.S. companies to report all chemical emissions from each of their plants. Through the Freedom of Information Act (from a systems point of view one of the most important laws in the nation), that information became a matter of public record. In July 1988 the first data on chemical emissions became available. The reported emissions were not illegal, but they didn’t look very good when they were published in local papers by enterprising reporters, who had a tendency to make lists of “the top ten local polluters.” That’s all that happened. There were no lawsuits, no required reductions, no fines, no penalties. But within two years chemical emissions nationwide (at least as reported, and presumably also in fact) had decreased by 40 percent. Some companies were launching policies to bring their emissions down by 90 percent, just because of the release of previously sequestered information.

6. Locate responsibility in the system.

Look for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside events can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down incidences of infectious disease.) But sometimes they can’t. And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system.

“Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision-making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision-makers.

Dartmouth College reduced intrinsic responsibility when it took thermostats out of individual offices and classrooms and put temperature-control decisions under the guidance of a central computer. That was done as an energy-saving measure. My observation from a low level in the hierarchy is that the main consequence was greater oscillations in room temperature. When my office gets overheated now, instead of turning down the thermostat, I have to call an office across campus, which gets around to making corrections over a period of hours or days, and which often overcorrects, setting up the need for another phone call. One way of making that system more, rather than less responsible, might have been to let professors keep control of their own thermostats and charge them directly for the amount of energy they use. (Thereby privatizing a commons!).

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipe downstream from their outflow pipe. It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt. It could mean Congress would no longer be allowed to legislate rules from which it exempts itself.

7. Make feedback policies for feedback systems.

President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback.

He suggested, at a time when oil imports were soaring, that there be a tax on gasoline proportional to the fraction of U.S. oil consumption that had to be imported. If imports continued to rise the tax would rise, until it suppressed demand and brought forth substitutes and reduced imports. If imports fell to zero, the tax would fall to zero.

The tax never got passed.

Carter was also trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the U.S. and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped.

That never happened either.

You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops–loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process.

8. Pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable.

Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live.

If something is ugly, say so. If it is tacky, inappropriate, out of proportion, unsustainable, morally degrading, ecologically impoverishing, or humanly demeaning, don’t let it pass. Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can precisely define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can precisely define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.

9. Go for the good of the whole.

Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. As Kenneth Boulding once said, Don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability–whether they are easily measured or not.

As you think about a system, spend part of your time from a vantage point that lets you see the whole system, not just the problem that may have drawn you to focus on the system to begin with. And realize, that, especially in the short term, changes for the good of the whole may sometimes seem to be counter to the interests of a part of the system. It helps to remember that the parts of a system cannot survive without the whole. The long term interests of your liver require the long term health of your body, and the long term interests of sawmills require the long-term health of forests.

10. Expand time horizons.

The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. The time horizon of most families still extends farther than that–through the lifetimes of children or grandchildren. Many Native American cultures actively spoke of and considered in their decisions the effects upon the seventh generation to come. The longer the operant time horizon, the better the chances for survival.

In the strict systems sense there is no long-term/short-term distinction. Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago.

When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term–the whole system.

11. Expand thought horizons.

Defy the disciplines. In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re 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 from–while not being limited by–economists 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 won’t make it easy for you.

Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. 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. They will have to go into learning mode, to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system.

It can be done. It’s very exciting when it happens.

12. Expand the boundary of caring.

Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails.

As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to believe that which they know.

13. Celebrate complexity.

Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.

There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems. Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us.

14. Hold fast to the goal of goodness.

Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. Just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are Not News. They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can’t expect everyone to behave like that.

And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly, amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love.

We know what to do about eroding goals. Don’t weigh the bad news more heavily than the good. And keep standards absolute.

*****

This is quite a list. Systems thinking can only tell us to do these things. It can’t do them for us.

And so we are brought to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap. But it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond–to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

_____________________________________________

Donella Meadows authored and co-authored many books including The Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits, syndicated “The Global Citizen” column, taught at Dartmouth College, helped found the Balaton Group on sustainability, was a MacArthur Fellow, and lived and worked on an organic farm.

For more information on the work of Donella Meadows contact Sustainability Institute, 3 Linden Road, Hartland, VT. 05048 [www.sustainer.org]

Earth is Whole

Earth is not flat. Earth is much more than round. Earth is whole.

“Earth is Whole” means that all the planet’s physical features and living organisms are interconnected. They work together in important and meaningful ways. The clouds, oceans, mountains, volcanoes, plants, bacteria and animals all play important roles in determining how our planet works.

Systems within Systems within Systems

The first step towards understanding how Earth works is thinking about our planet as a system. We use the word “system” when we want to describe something that is made up of different kinds of parts that join together to form an interconnected whole.

1. each part of a system can itself be described as a system;
2. a system can be very different from its parts.

Each part of a system can itself be described as a system.

You are a system. One of the parts of the “you system” is your circulatory system. The heart, a part of the circulatory system, is also a system made of parts. Its parts include muscle cells, nerve cells and valves. A heart muscle cell is part of the heart system but it is also a system which is made up of a cell membrane, cell nucleus and many different proteins.

And the story does not end with us. Each of us is part of a family system. Each of us is part of an ecosystem. Each of us is part of an entire human system that is part of a system of life on this planet.

A system can be very different from its parts.

Think about your arteries, red blood cells, stomach and toenails. Your stomach is a part of who you are, but you are much more than your stomach. You are much more than the sum of your parts. As a functioning interconnected whole, you have characteristics that do not exist in any of your parts. You have properties that transcend, that go far beyond the qualities of your parts.

A car provides another example of a system. A car has brakes, wheels, cylinders, battery, windshield wipers, carburetor, gas tank, metal frame, steering wheel, and hundreds of other parts. Individually none of those parts will move you from your home to school, work, a restaurant or a lake. Joined together as an interconnected whole, the car system can take you away. It has properties that are qualitatively different than the properties of its parts. No part of a car gets 35 miles per gallon on the highway. No part of a car has the ability to transport you up a mountain road. Only the car as a functioning whole system has these properties.

The popular saying “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” describes this second system feature. This popular saying is much deeper than it might first appear. When we say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, we mean that the whole system has qualities that are different than those of the parts. The whole is qualitatively different, which is a much more important difference than a mere increase in quantity.

Take water as another example of a system. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. At normal temperatures and pressures, they are both gases. Hydrogen is highly explosive and fire requires oxygen. Put them together and you have a liquid that extinguishes fires. The system of hydrogen joined with oxygen (H2O) has properties that are qualitatively very different from the parts hydrogen alone or oxygen alone.

The reason to care about “systems within systems within systems” is that systems thinking provides us with a way to understand any particular system, especially complicated ones like planet Earth. No matter what the system is, we can always understand it better by asking three systems questions:

The Earth System

Earth’s Matter
With respect to matter, Earth is a closed system. Matter does not enter or leave.

Earth’s Energy
With respect to energy, Earth is an open system. Sunlight energy flows in and heat energy escapes.

Earth’s Life
With respect to life, Earth is a networked system. Not only do organisms form an interconnected web, they also participate actively in Earth’s matter cycles and energy flows. Human beings depend on the web of life for the air that we breathe and the food that we eat. As our numbers have exponentially increased and our technologies have altered virtually every part of the globe, we have become a very important part of this web of life.

Three Principles

MATTER CYCLES
Each of the elements that is vital for life exists on Earth in a closed loop of cyclical changes. From a systems point of view, Earth is essentially a closed system with respect to matter.

ENERGY FLOWS
The functioning of our planet relies on a constant input of energy from the sun. This energy leaves Earth in the form of heat flowing to outer space. From a systems point of view, Earth is an open system with respect to energy.

LIFE WEBS
A vast and intricate network of relationships connects all Earth’s organisms with each other and with the cycles of matter and the flows of energy. From a systems point of view, Earth is a networked system with respect to life.