Essay by Ed Bradon: “Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores an important fact: systems fight back…
The systems that enable modern life share a common origin. The water supply, the internet, the international supply chains bringing us cheap goods: each began life as a simple, working system. The first electric grid was no more than a handful of electric lamps hooked up to a water wheel in Godalming, England, in 1881. It then took successive decades of tinkering and iteration by thousands of very smart people to scale these systems to the advanced state we enjoy today. At no point did a single genius map out the final, finished product.
But this lineage of (mostly) working systems is easily forgotten. Instead, we prefer a more flattering story: that complex systems are deliberate creations, the product of careful analysis. And, relatedly, that by performing this analysis – now known as ‘systems thinking’ in the halls of government – we can bring unruly ones to heel. It is an optimistic perspective, casting us as the masters of our systems and our destiny…(More)”.
