Book Review-The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper By Roland Allen

This was a book that, on the surface, would not hook me. Yet, the published book reviews from people I respect tempted me to give it a shot. It was much more than I expected in 20/20 hindsight. I thoroughly enjoyed the history of the simple notebook, its unique history, and the number of intriguing permutations the notebook and  notetaking had manifested throughout human history. The only history not recorded here is whether there was a similar history of Asian notebook tradition that was developed in parallel since Asian language traditions are different from the western ones, that history would certainly be intriguing as well.

The number of diverse stories told in this tome about how the tradition of people writing notes down for personal usage as well as for posterity evolved is proof positive that the need to record our activities, whether it is to remind ourselves or to record for the sake of others that come after us, is strong. An essential undercurrent that I sensed through reading these stories of notetaking people is that they were mostly not motivated by a sense of leaving their legacy; they were, however, more concerned with recording their activities out of a sense of duty to themselves.

The book starts with the very first notebook, an accounting ledger which was created to record the profits and debits of the most mundane but important of human activity: commerce. I must admit that the first few chapters tracking the evolution of the initial accountant’s notebooks were less than exciting, but what kept me going forward were the evolution of the use of notebooks in the home, the history of the zibaldoni, a precursor to the Commonplace Book. I had started keeping my own sets of Commonplace books a few years ago and the history of this practice drew my interest.

The book is full of these distinct little stories about how notetakers, through both necessity and ingenuity, invented the modern version of the notebook for their own needs.

Indeed, this book roughly follows a chronological path of discerning scribes noting their own work and practicing the art of observation assiduously and with discipline in order to directly benefit themselves and indirectly those that follow them. The stories of naturalists, ocean explorers, engineers, scientists, travelers, artists, amongst many others, all noting their observations, summaries, conjectures, and the intricate granularities of their thought process are awe inspiring. The names associated with the stories are both obscure and famous: Leonardo, Newton, Darwin, et, al.

But the stories do not just tell historical vignettes as sideshow entertainment, although they are all very entertaining in their own way. Many of the chapters draw on the inspirational uses that people have deployed their notebooks.

One salient story comes from someone who is working to reconstruct historical global weather patterns through the careful and detailed observations and numerical data accumulated in climate logs throughout history, from ship’s logs to land-based observers. This immense and global  undertaking has allowed climate scientists to accurately create climate models of detail and precision, enough so that they are filling the wide chasms in our understanding of our climactic past.

On a more personal level, there is the practice of  patient diaries, diaries that are kept patiently and carefully by the nurses, doctors, caregivers, families, and many others who were compelled log everything that they deemed important for those patients who were in comas or were unconscious for many reasons. The patients, who awaken from their slumber, treat these books as the history of what they were not able to experience, as a conduit to a past that they did not experience. This was a story that moved me to tears, as the selflessness of the people who put themselves voluntarily to write, in excruciating minute details, of a someone’s journey through the unknown. Sometimes the patients are strangers, sometimes they are loved ones. It is a selfless and generous act of loving one’s fellow human, which is rarely acknowledged, let alone recognized.

Another story that moved me emotionally is about the act of journaling as a form of self-care;  for those who have had devastatingly traumatic experiences in their lives or for those who are experiencing the trials and tribulations of life as it ebbs and flows through time. The story details the psychological studies conducted with those who have used journaling as a means of healing and those who did not use journaling. The journal writers had shown remarkable emotional progress as they have come to understand their experiences and have learned to resolve the legacies of their trauma through just writing down their observations of their emotional inner life. The practice of writing in journals has been shown to be a healing practice, a means for those who choose to write about their traumas in order to understand those events that have happened to them. It aligns with my personal motto, which I learned from a Joan Didion quote: I write to find out what I think; that quote has been my motivation for many years. The practice of writing, whether it is in a journal or in a blog, has served to realign my personal priorities and has helped me lay out my philosophies and guided my instantaneous thoughts constructively as well as healing me of my emotional wounds.

In the concluding chapter, the author delves into the role that the notebook can play in our future; that of an extension of our mind. This was a subject that had fascinated me, as I had come to learn from many contemporary explorers of our evolving thinking and ways of using external means to bolster our cognitive abilities. While my our boxes of notebooks are just beginning to grow, knowing that others have already accumulated an immense and useful collection of notebooks that they use for their personal, professional, emotional, and intellectual growth was quite the motivation to continuing my notetaking habit. I am beginning to benefit from the copious amount of work that I have already done, and I hope to continue to benefit.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper is one of those books that I will permanently keep close to me in my permanent collection of books that I will reach into so that I can constantly be inspired and renewed by its diverse topics, always reminding me the examples of the persistent notetakers that came before me.

 

 

Book Review-Thinking in Systems: A Primer By Donella 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 Donella 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.