After re-reading Donella Meadow‘s essay, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, I continued to her other wonderful essay, Dancing with systems. She describes why the best way to interact with a system is to dance with it:
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.
Meadows provides a list of ways (with explanations) of how to dance with systems:
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.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/30752926]
Related articles
- Meadows classics and newbooks from Shuman & Lovins (peacecouple.com)
- How to change, or transcend, paradigms (peacecouple.com)
Related articles
- How to change, or transcend, paradigms (peacecouple.com)
