"[…] when a problem arises either from within a republic or outside it, one brought about either by internal or external reasons, one that has become so great that it begins to make everyone afraid, the safest policy is to delay dealing with it rather than trying to do away with it, because those who try to do away with it almost always increase its strength and accelerate the harm which they feared might come from it." (Niccolò Machiavelli, "Discourses on Livy", 1531)
"Delay always breeds danger; and to protract a great design is often to ruin it." (Miguel de Cervantes, "The History of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha", 1605)
"Delays, when the effect of one variable on another takes time, constitute the third basic building block for a systems language. Virtually all feedback processes have some form of delay. But often the delays are either unrecognized or not well understood. This can result in "overshoot," going further than needed to achieve a desired result." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)
"Unrecognized delays can also lead to instability and breakdown, especially when they are long. […] The systems viewpoint is generally oriented toward the long-term view. That's why delays and feedback loops are so important. In the short term, you can often ignore them; they're inconsequential. They only come back to haunt you in the long term." (Peter M Senge, "The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization", 1990)
"Delay time, the time between causes and their impacts, can highly influence systems. Yet the concept of delayed effect is often missed in our impatient society, and when it is recognized, it’s almost always underestimated. Such oversight and devaluation can lead to poor decision making as well as poor problem solving, for decisions often have consequences that don’t show up until years later. Fortunately, mind mapping, fishbone diagrams, and creativity/brainstorming tools can be quite useful here."(Stephen G Haines, "The Manager's Pocket Guide to Strategic and Business Planning", 1998)
"Simple analytic thinking [as opposed to systems thinking] focuses on cause-and-effect: one cause for every one effect. It asks the all too common either/or question. Its weakest link, and the reason it’s not working in today’s world, is that it doesn’t take into consideration the environment, other systems, and the multiple and/or delayed causality that surrounds each cause and effect. Nor does it consider a part’s interrelationships and interdependencies with other parts." (Stephen G Haines, "The Manager's Pocket Guide to Strategic and Business Planning", 1998)
"Bounded rationality simultaneously constrains the complexity of our cognitive maps and our ability to use them to anticipate the system dynamics. Mental models in which the world is seen as a sequence of events and in which feedback, nonlinearity, time delays, and multiple consequences are lacking lead to poor performance when these elements of dynamic complexity are present. Dysfunction in complex systems can arise from the misperception of the feedback structure of the environment. But rich mental models that capture these sources of complexity cannot be used reliably to understand the dynamics. Dysfunction in complex systems can arise from faulty mental simulation-the misperception of feedback dynamics. These two different bounds on rationality must both be overcome for effective learning to occur. Perfect mental models without a simulation capability yield little insight; a calculus for reliable inferences about dynamics yields systematically erroneous results when applied to simplistic models." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"Much of the art of system dynamics modeling is discovering and representing the feedback processes, which, along with stock and flow structures, time delays, and nonlinearities, determine the dynamics of a system. […] the most complex behaviors usually arise from the interactions (feedbacks) among the components of the system, not from the complexity of the components themselves." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"The mental models people use to guide their decisions are dynamically deficient. […] people generally adopt an event-based, open-loop view of causality, ignore feedback processes, fail to appreciate time delays between action and response and in the reporting of information, do not understand stocks and flows and are insensitive to nonlinearities that may alter the strengths of different feedback loops as a system evolves." (John D Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"[…] our mental models fail to take into account the complications of the real world - at least those ways that one can see from a systems perspective. It is a warning list. Here is where hidden snags lie. You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long-term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays. You are likely to mistreat, misdesign, or misread systems if you don’t respect their properties of resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy." (Donella H Meadows, “Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, 2008)
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