Chapter 6 & 7 552's

Chapter 6
1. Leverage points are points of power! It can turn the tide of a whole system.
2.Although people involved in systems generally know where to find leverage points, they tend to push them in the wrong direction.
3.The world's leader's are fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems but they're pushing in the wrong direction!
4.In relation to cities, subsidized low-income housing is a leverage point. The less of it there is the better off the city is.
5.Counterintuitive: the word which Forrester uses to describe complex systems. We often use them backwards, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve

1.Most systems have evolved or are designed to stay far out of range of critical parameters. So most systems will not get to a danger zone on their own, people push them that way.
2.Buffers are usually physical entities, not easy to change.
3. The only way to fix a system that is laid out poorly is to rebuild it if possible.
4.Delays in feedback loops are critical determinants of system behavior. They are common causes of oscillations.
5.A delay in a feedback process is critical relative to rates of change in the stocks that the feedback loop is trying to control.

1. So in theory if systems were merely left alone and undisturbed by humans would they all work out?
2. Why are buffers difficult to change yet leverage points easy to shift in the wrong direction?

1.Social Systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses.
2.Self-organizing, nonlinear feedback systems are inherently unpredictable. They are not controllable.
3.Systems cannot be controlled only designed and redesigned.
4.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 morality.
5.Meadows assures us that everything we know and everything everyone knows is only a model.

1.Meadows decided he would like to add an 11th commandment and I thought I should quote it because it relates back to more than scientific information.."thou shalt not distort, delay or withhold information".
2.INFORMATION IS POWER.
3.The first step in respective language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible.
4. Pretending that something doesn't exist if its hard to quantify leads to faulty models.
5.Hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers not the top. Don't maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole.

1.Things that are hard to identify may be more important that the things that are easy so why would one attempt to ignore it from a system?
2. Why would someone attempting to create a valid system ignore information?