Book Review-Thinking in Systems: A Primer By Donatella Meadows

I had worked in companies that supplied the transportation industries, both aviation and automotive industries, which was where I became acquainted with the idea of systems engineering. There was also a school of Industrial and Systems Engineering at my alma mater, Georgia Tech, but I was too distracted by my gradual studies to pay any attention to what they were doing at the time. I was curious but never curious enough to dig into the granularities of the idea of systems thinking until later in my engineering career, when I organized a technical session in a conference, the topic was an introductory session on systems engineering. That experience piqued my interest, which is how I came to possess this book by Donatella Meadows. It was recommended to me by people in the systems engineering area as a starting point to trying to understand what the idea of systems thinking.

The book sat atop of my To Be Read list until I finally got around to it.  While the book was indeed an excellent primer for someone who is a complete neophyte in the area, the book also left much to be desired. At this point I am not sure whether it is the explanation in the book, my own lack of understanding of the foundations of the area, or whether I was just assuming too much about the subject which left me grasping.

The author split the seven chapters into three parts. Part 1 defines the underlying structures, foundational beliefs, and behavior of systems. Part 2 Digs into the insights from the author’s work in the area, giving us behind the curtains views on what the author believes to be the key insights that she had internalized in her years of practice as a systems thinker, as well as the common pitfalls and false steps that system thinkers tend to fall into in their practice. The author also appeals to our curiosity when she tries to sell the readers on how the pitfalls and false steps can be turned into advantages. Finally, Part 3 is where the author lists the tactical points in a system view where intervention into the system can be made, where the systems thinker can actuate some change by applying leverage to change the trajectory of the system. The last chapter is the sales pitch, this is the chapter where the author makes the argument that if we were perspicacious about the world around us, we can become prescient about how the world will behave if we analogized all that we know to a system, and thinking in systems will clarify how we understand and perceive the world around us.

As an electrical engineer, one of my great downfalls occurred when I was preparing for my doctoral qualifying exams. I failed because my theses is based on the theory and practice automatic control systems. My committee allowed me to bone up on the subject and retake the exam. I made it my mission to understand the subject and I passed the exam the second time around.  Thus, automatic controls concepts, theories, and practice has been at the center of my applied engineering career; indeed, my world view is informed by the automatic controls structure and framework that I had worked so hard to understand. It is my habit, it is actually more of a reflex, to draw connections between whatever I am working on, technical or not, in automatic controls terms. It is therefore natural that I drew the analogy between amorphous and deliberately ambiguous systems thinking concepts that I had read about in this book and the technical and mathematical automatic controls ideas that have become part of my procedural thinking.

After having read Part 1 of this book, it became obvious to me that the idea of system thinking is based on the feedback control paradigm from automatic controls, whether it was obvious to anyone else or not. The ideas presented in the book of stocks, flows, and block diagrams loaned themselves readily to the concepts that are in my mind, which made me jump into analogy mode. The ideas of stabilizing feedback and reinforcing feedback became negative and positive feedback loops. The ideas presented in the book about the importance of time delays became time constants that are inherent to automatic control systems. The descriptions of the intrinsic nonlinearities in systems parallels nicely with how I understand the coupled system plants are modelled in automatic controls. The idea of self-organizing systems is indeed what automatic controls designers seek to do on a local scale with adaptive controls, amongst numerous other  techniques.

After I discovered that the recognized originator of the precursor to Systems Engineering and  Systems Dynamics, was  Jay W. Forrester (Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, 1961), (Forrester, Principles of Systems, 1968), an electrical engineer who had worked on the magnetic core memories, I was more convinced than ever that Forrester had taken the strict and mathematical practice of designing automatic controllers and eased the technical constraints to the ideas used in automatic controls so that can be analogized and applied to creating a perspective that is used to make sense of reality through the lenses of engineering controls theory. Indeed, that is the framework and perspective that I have taken towards learning about system thinking, taking advantage of my existing knowledge and using its heuristics to gain understanding of systems engineering.

My idea of using my prior knowledge in automatic controls fell apart somewhat as I read further into this book. There were major gaps in the analogy that I was drawing between system thinking and automatic controls. In consulting with some people, they pointed out that the basis of automatic control systems is assuming linear behavior, which is not true, nonlinear systems are a very large part of automatic controls writ large. We use techniques to treat nonlinear systems as point wise linearized to simplify the mathematics or we use piecewise linear models, once again to simplify the mathematics, or we go through complicated nonlinear solution methods to solve nonlinear systems.

The author also staked a claim in the book that while engineering controls places prediction and control at the center of its focus, system engineering does not. I can accept that paradigm, but I am confused as to how the system engineers define and identify what they mean as systems? More importantly, since they place such a premium of the value of feedback paths — as they rightly should — how do they identify the feedback loops in the amorphous and ambiguous “plant” or system? One of the lessons I garnered from automatic controls education is that the best laid plans with regard to the controls are often obliterated by the unmodeled dynamics that are hidden and they are always the nasty surprises when they are inadvertently excited by an input. Many test pilots have given their lives because they were flying airplanes that did not respond to calculated controls that failed to take into account the unknown dynamics.

In reading the chapter on traps and pitfalls for system thinking, and the chapter on points of intervention for systems, the idea struck me that both chapters, while valuable, seem to consist of heuristics and ad hoc solutions and observations. They are tools that can be used to resolve issues in designing or resolving system behavior, they are not systematically consistent solutions, which means that there is a possibility that their use might also introduce undesirable bahviors. This is the point where I realized that the author is serious about abandoning the prediction and control purpose of automatic controls. The idea here is to design and identify the system in a piecewise and progressive fashion so that the designers do not fall into the trap of creating system designs based on ever changing system parameters in a model. The system can never be modelled for all time, it is always evolving, which makes sense but quite disconcerting for the controls engineer in me.

Finally, I am curious to understand how Forrester and the systems engineering colleagues went from point A to point B, how the ideas of automatic controls evolved into the systems thinking that Meadows is writing about. I am quite curious, and I would appreciate any advice or resources that I can consult with in order to find a path to those answers. In addition, I wonder if the later concepts that have become integrated into automatic controls have been similarly evolved and broadened into systems engineering; ideas about stability, adaptation, controllability, and observability since Forrester published his work in the 1960’s.

This was a very readable, concise, and well written book. It serves as a good introduction to the idea of system thinking. Unfortunately, it raised more questions in my mind than it answered, although it could be interpreted as being a fortunate event, since it will allow me to dig further into the granularities.

References

Forrester, J. W. (1961). Industrial Dynamics. Waltham MA: Pegasus Communications.

Forrester, J. W. (1968). Principles of Systems. Waltham MA: Pegassus Communications.

 

 

 

Book Review-The Geography of Genius By Eric Weiner

 I became aware of this book when I was reading a list of  Bill Walton’s favorite books after his passing, this title popped off the page. I have been reading and learning about genius and its place in our culture recently and this title had a unique spin on the idea of genius, and what idea means in human consciousness. The idea that a place, at a given time, can play a role in creating a hothouse for original thinkers that nurtures an environment that is conducive to growing creativity seemed intriguing to me.

I had previously read and enjoyed  Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert S. Root-Bernstein (Author), and Michele M. Root-Bernstein. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/01/book-review-sparks-of-genius-by-robert.html Which delved into the kind thinking tools that are employed by creative people as well as the changes in perspective these people employ to open their imagination. I used that reading experience as preparation in anticipation of this reading experience. The central topics are different for the two books, as this book is focused on the seven cities/locations had experienced a golden age of creativity and innovative thinking, writ large as the author had identified: Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley. Vienna had two chapters devoted to it as the golden ages happened at different times and the Viennese golden ages were focused on different areas of genius. The order of the cities roughly follows chronological order.

The author travelled to these cities, stayed there for an extended period of time, met and interviewed people in those cities who are knowledgeable about the histories of the cities as well as the people who created those golden ages. Since the author is a travel writer, his descriptions of the visits to these cities play a key role in his narrative and are a major source of reading enjoyment. His sense of how to document history as well as his ability to spin a yarn all contributed to a most entertaining narrative.

The most important part of the very enjoyable narrative is the author’s ability to stay with the main theme of his mission, which is to find out what qualities each of these cities had that made their golden age possible, the salient reasons why it happened to these cities and not others. A particularly helpful technique that the author uses is to continuously reiterates salient points that he made in the previous chapter, this helps bind the new narrative with the older narrative. It reminds the readers of what they had read previously, it helps the reader  synthesize the contexts of the idea with each new city, to integrate the ideas in their thoughts, and to help the reader compare and contrast the different manifestations of those ideas while never losing the  different flavors  of the concept which are solely attributable to a specific city.

A case in point is his focus on the social aspects of each city and how the social life feeds the creative spirit of the city. Places like: the Agora of Athens, the Hangzhou West Lake, the piazzas of Florence, the clubs of Edinburgh, the addas of Calcutta, the Café’s of Vienna, and so on. The places where people can meet, converse, and argue freely; be seriously challenged in a public setting to properly test their ideas; have an honest exchange of ideas without residual ill will, all under an umbrella of civility. The unique feature present in all the cities is that the group interaction never devolves into groupthink, which is what usually happens in modern day brainstorming sessions. There are many ground rules which make these social group interaction successful, the main difference is that the conversation is not sharply focused on specific subjects and that the purpose of the social interaction is quite dispersed and amorphous, which allows for the participants range broadly or deeply, as they please; whereas the modern day brainstorming sessions are set up for being useless because they are usually convened by people with an agenda to keep the subject narrow and focused. The social interactions described by the author are rarely convened by authorities or people with specific agenda, it is a free flowing free for all about everything and nothing at the same time.

This is just one example of the author’s writing expertise that draws the reader in, as he clearly integrates the common factors from all the cities to give us broad yet well-thought-out conclusions. It was all I could do to keep track of the salient points because there are so many of them. His various impressions about these cities reinforced the broad general observations that he made about the salient elements that caused the creative tensions that brought out the possibilities for each city to have a golden age of creativity.

It was obvious very early on in my reading that if these salient factors that are existent in these cities were implemented artificially in a generic city, golden ages of creativity wouldn’t necessarily blossom in those cities; correlation does not equal causation. I  recognize that these factors the author identified are the serendipitous results of the meeting of minds, those factors, and quite a bit of luck. However, it is always interesting to find out about the intangible factors that serve to incubate a vast amount of intellectual thought from seemingly disparate groups of people who are brought together by circumstance to a geographic location.

I so enjoyed Eric Weiner’s ability to aggregate ideas, his way with words, and his ability to communicate the key lessons from the history that he is writing about that I had purchased a few of his other books to add to my already teetering TBR pile.