Original link: http://lichuanyang.top/posts/53791/

The role of this book is mainly to teach you how to think more effectively in the face of complex problems in reality. The book itself focuses on the basic concepts of the system, and these concepts are actually relatively easy to understand. In addition, the author gave a lot of examples. When I first read this book, it felt so disconnected between theory and practical examples. But later I gradually felt that this topic is indeed not so easy to talk about and understandable, and readers need to pay more for their own thinking in order to have substantial gains. The examples given by the author are very good introductions to guide readers to think. By thinking about these examples with the author, we can help ourselves to better understand the concepts and logic of the book.

Therefore, in this note, I mainly extract some of the core concepts in the book mechanistically, and at the same time, I will try to give some examples around me. If you want to better understand each part of the book, it is recommended to read the book and follow the author’s ideas to think about the logic of those examples.

basic concept

A system is a set of interconnected things that influence each other in a specific pattern of behavior over time.

Any system consists of three building blocks: elements, connections, functions, or goals.

Stocks are the basis of all systems, such as water in a bathtub, population, books in a bookstore, volume of trees, money in a bank, etc. However, stock does not have to be material. Your self-confidence, good reputation in the circle of friends, or good hopes for the world can all be stock.

Stock will change over time, and what makes it change is “flow”

Drawing a stock-flow diagram is a fundamental way to understand a system.

A feedback loop is formed when a change in a stock affects its associated inflow or outflow.

The regulation loop and the enhancement loop are two very common feedback loops, which are easier to understand and literally mean. The adjustment loop tends to keep the system stock stable, while the enhancement loop will continue to amplify and enhance the original development trend.

common system

Next, some common system models are used to help you better understand what a system is.

single stock system

• System 1.1: A system with one stock and two regulating loops that balance each other, such as a temperature regulator, through a heating regulating loop and a cooling regulating loop, to control the stock (temperature) to stabilize.

• System 1.2: A system of a stock, an augmentation loop, and an adjustment loop, such as population, where birth is an augmentation loop, and death is an adjustment loop.

• System 1.3: A system with a time delay, such as an inventory, compared to a simple thermostat, the main difference is that there will be a delay in the regulation loop.

Dual stock system

• System 2.1: A system in which a renewable stock is constrained by another non-renewable stock, such as the exploitation of non-renewable resources such as oil, will have two stocks of capital and resources. Profit, the profit obtained can increase capital, thereby expanding production capacity and increasing mining volume. At the same time, due to the non-renewable oil, it will become more and more difficult to extract, which also forms a regulation loop.

• System 2.2: A system with two renewable stocks, such as fishery, is similar to oil, except that fish is a renewable resource, which will cause the development of the system to be different from the previous type of system.

Three characteristics of the system

• adaptability. The reason why the system is adaptable is that there are many feedback loops that interact with each other in the internal structure of the system. It is these loops that support each other. Even when the system suffers a huge disturbance, it can still restore the system to its original state in many different ways. Stateful. For example, the human body is a very adaptable system.

• self-organization. The ability of a system to complicate its own structure is called “self-organization”. For a system, self-organization means that the system can “evolve” by itself to accomplish larger goals or achieve more complex functions. Like my previous boss, I often told me that our goal is to build a team with the ability to “self-organize”. Only in this way can the team progress with the development of the business.

• Hierarchical. Self-organizing systems often generate certain hierarchies or hierarchies in the process of constantly generating new structures and increasing their complexity. A large system contains many subsystems, and some subsystems can be decomposed into more and smaller subsystems. If each subsystem can basically maintain itself, play a certain function, and serve the needs of a larger system, and the larger system is responsible for regulating and strengthening the operation of each subsystem, then a relatively stable, Resilient and efficient structure.

obstacles to the system

Everything we think we know about the world is just a model. Our models are usually highly consistent with the real world. This is why we are one of the most successful species on the planet. Our models are still far from a complete picture of the world. This is why we often make mistakes and feel unexpected.

Therefore, we have to see what problems can be found from the perspective of the system to help us make as few mistakes as possible. The author mainly organizes the following 6 points:

• System structure is the root of behavior, and system behavior is a series of events that occur over time; people are easily confused by appearances
• In a non-linear world, don’t use a linear mindset
• System boundaries need to be properly delineated
• Be aware of the constraints
• Ubiquitous time delays in systems
• People only have bounded rationality, resulting in decisions that are often not overall optimal

System traps and countermeasures

This chapter is devoted to more specific issues and possible responses to these issues.

Policy resistance;

There are some long-lasting patterns of behavior that may not be expected and are often seen as a problem. Despite the invention of various technologies and various policy measures to try to “fix” them, the system seems stubborn and produces the same behavior every year. This is a common system trap that people are used to calling “solving the symptoms but not the root cause” or “policy resistance”, such as drug abuse and unemployment.

“Policy resistance” comes from the bounded rationality of each participant in the system, and each participant has its own goals. Resistance to change occurs when the goals of individual subsystems are different or inconsistent. The most effective way to deal with “policy resistance” is to try to align the goals of the various subsystems, usually with a larger overall goal that allows all participants to break through their bounded rationality.

Tragedy of the Commons

It is easy to see development (or consumption) escalate or grow with limited resources shared by people. An important reason for the “tragedy of the commons” is that the feedback between the consumption of resources and the increase in the number of users of resources is missing, or the time delay is too long.

There are three ways to prevent the “tragedy of the commons”: one is to educate people to help people see the consequences more clearly; the other is to privatize resources; and the third is to take some control measures such as quota system.

target erosion

Performance standards are influenced by past performance, especially when people view past performance negatively, that is, pay too much attention to bad news, which will start a vicious circle, which will lead to continuous decline in the performance of goals and systems. In layman’s terms, it is boiled frogs in warm water, and the situation gradually deteriorates unconsciously.

The response is to maintain an absolute standard of performance. Better yet, keep improving your goals and motivate yourself by setting performance standards to the best in the past.

Competitive escalation

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. The expected system state of each participant is relative to other participants, and they try to surpass each other, one step ahead, not even keeping pace; and each participant has a tendency to overestimate the opponent’s hostility and exaggerate the opponent’s strength . The system structure of competitive escalation is an enhancement loop that develops exponentially, and once a certain limit is exceeded, it will intensify competition faster than most people can imagine.

One countermeasure relies on one party voluntarily making concessions; a more elegant way is to expect both parties to reach an agreement.

The rich get richer

Using accumulated wealth, power, special channels or inside information, more wealth, power, channels and information can be created. These are another example of the so-called “rich get richer” archetype.

Countermeasures: Diversification, that is, allowing the loser in the competition to withdraw and opening another new game; anti-monopoly law, that is, strictly limiting the proportion of the largest share occupied by the winner; amending the competition rules to restrict the participation of the strongest the advantages of the winners, or give some special care to the disadvantaged participants to enhance their competitiveness (such as handouts, gifts, tax adjustments, transfer payments, etc.); give the winners a variety of rewards to avoid them in the next round Compete for the same limited resources, or create deviations.

pass on the burden

When confronted with a systemic problem, when solutions are adopted that do nothing to address the underlying underlying problem, but only alleviate (or mask) the symptoms of the problem, a burden-shifting, dependency, and addiction condition arises.

The best way to deal with this trap is to prevent it from falling into it. It is important to realize that policies or practices that merely alleviate symptoms or mask signals do not really solve the problem.

circumvent the rules

There may be loopholes or exceptions to any rule, and thus opportunities to circumvent the rule. That is, while some behaviors ostensibly obey or do not violate the rules, in essence they do not conform to the original intent of the rules, and even distort the system.

The response is to design or redesign the rules to gain creative feedback from the behavior of circumventing the rules so that they can play a positive role and achieve the rules’ original purpose.

target misalignment

System behavior is particularly sensitive to the goals of feedback loops. If the definition of goals is inaccurate or incomplete, even if the system faithfully enforces all the rules of operation, its output may not necessarily be what people really want.

The response is to set goals and targets appropriately to reflect the real welfare of the system.

The way the system changes, the leverage points that can intervene in the system

This section contains some of the ways in which we can intervene in the system, ranked from least to most effective. Many of the theories in this chapter, I believe you have seen some more or less in other places. Many excellent people, even if they haven’t read this book, actually think this way a lot of the time. The beauty of the system can help us understand why we do this more systematically.

12: Digital, adjust the system through the value of various flow. Like King of Glory’s balance planning, basically a large part of the energy is on this matter. If the hero’s mechanism is too strong, the value will be sharply cut. If the hero is not good, the value will be increased and let him stand. There is also a lot of strength. This approach is actually a low-efficiency approach that cannot change the basic structure of the system. But most people focus 90% of their attention on parameters.

11: Buffer. By increasing the capacity of the buffer, we can usually stabilize the system. However, if the buffer is too large, the system will also become inelastic, and it will react too slowly to changes. At the same time, it also takes huge time and money to build, expand or maintain the capacity of certain buffers, such as the construction of reservoirs or warehouses. To this end, some companies have invented the “just-in-time production” model of “zero inventory”. In the eyes of these businesses, occasional fluctuations or out-of-stocks are not much of a loss compared to spending huge sums to maintain a fixed inventory.

10. Stock-flow structure: physical systems and their intersections. This is mainly about the overall design of the system. The right leverage point needs to be designed from the start. Once the structure of the entity is established, finding leverage points requires understanding the constraints and bottlenecks of the system, and maximizing their efficiency while avoiding large fluctuations or expansions beyond their capacity. And if the system is already running, it will be very difficult to adjust the key nodes in it. The famous concept of “anti-corrosion layer” in software engineering can optimize this problem to a certain extent, that is, reduce the cost of adjusting key nodes through some preset intermediate layers.

9. Time Latency: How quickly the system reacts to changes. Time lag is a high leverage point, but in reality, time lag is usually not very easy to change. The development of many things has its inherent laws, and it takes as long as it takes. You can’t accumulate a large amount of capital overnight, your children can’t grow up overnight, and you can’t speed up the growth of crops by pulling out seedlings. But if there is a way to change the time delay, it can often achieve significant results. For example, in the recent epidemic prevention and control, why large-scale nucleic acid testing is often carried out is to reduce the time delay between the spread of the virus and the discovery of the virus in this way.

8. Regulatory loops: Feedback forces that attempt to correct for external influences. This is easy to understand. We can strengthen the control of the system by adding a regulating loop. The controller in kubernetes can be considered as the realization of the adjustment loop. Through different controllers, the value of different components, that is, the stock, can be controlled to the expected value.

7. Reinforcement loops: Feedback forces that drive revenue growth. Similar to the regulation loop, but with a different goal.

6. Information flow: The structure of who can access the information. Equivalent to a new loop, allowing people to get feedback where they didn’t get information before. For example, the overtime ranking of the evils of capitalism is to tell you the overtime information of your colleagues, so that you will naturally generate pressure and thus promote overtime.

5. System rules: incentives, penalties and constraints. This part, in fact, is to clearly define the scope, boundaries and degrees of freedom of the system.

4. Self-organization: The power of system structure to increase, change, or evolve. Following the topic at the beginning of the article, to build a self-organizing team, there are many things to do, such as improving the ability of each member of the team so that everyone has the ability to make decisions; enhancing the transparency of information within the team; and so on. Once such a team can be built, not only will the output be qualitatively improved, but the sense of achievement and happiness of the members of the team will also be greatly improved.

3. Goal: The purpose or function of the system. A certain actor in the system can clearly set, articulate, repeat, support, and adhere to new goals, leading to system change. This is why OKRs are so popular these years. Through clear and reasonable OKR, guide everyone to make more reasonable decisions and actions.

2. Social Paradigm: The mental model that determines why a system is a system. Some socially accepted ideas, some underlying underlying assumptions, and general perceptions about the nature of social reality constitute a society’s paradigm, or set of worldviews, which is a set of commonly believed beliefs about how the world works Basic assumptions, rules or beliefs. These beliefs are implicit because they are known to almost everyone in a society and need not be specifically stated. These paradigms naturally have an extremely significant impact on how the system works, and of course, changing these paradigms will be more difficult than changing other things.

1. Beyond the paradigm. At a higher level than changing paradigms, there is another point of leverage, which is to free yourself from the grip of any paradigm. This point actually has a bit of metaphysical meaning, so we won’t expand it here. The core point is that we must consciously jump out of the current system.

The survival law of the system, dance with the system

People who grew up in an industrial society with a passion for systems thinking are likely to make a serious mistake. They might assume that, through system analysis, the interconnections and complex entanglements in the system can be identified, and by the power of computers, the key to predicting and controlling the system can be found. Unfortunately, this is a misconception rooted in the ingrained mental model of the industrial age, the belief that there is a key to prediction and control. But in reality, to do this is completely unrealistic, we need to recognize and be willing to give up the illusion of control, and we need to do it in a very different way. In this way, we can still have a lot of room for action. This way is to dance with the system. We can’t control the system, but we can live better in it.

Next are some rules for dancing with the system. This part is equivalent to some small tips, and they are easy to understand. We will briefly list them:

• Keeping up with the beat of the system: To keep up with the system is to observe how it works. We need to pay more attention to facts and data, so as not to be carried away by other people’s theories.
• Expose your mental model to the sun, draw a diagram of the system structure, and force yourself to project your hidden assumptions and articulate them with precision.
• Trust, respect and share information
• Use language sparingly and enrich it with systematic concepts
• Focus on what’s important, not just what’s easy to measure
• Develop policies for feedback systems with feedback capabilities. For a dynamic, self-regulating feedback system, static and rigid policies cannot be used for regulation. A good policy must be able to adjust flexibly in a timely manner according to changes in the state of the system.
• Pursue the overall interest
• Hearing the Wisdom of the System
• Define the responsibilities of the system
• Be humble and be a learner
• celebrate complexity
• Extended time range
• Break all kinds of rules and regulations
• Widen the range of concerns
• Don’t lower the standard of “goodness”

Original address: http://lichuanyang.top/posts/53791/

This article is reproduced from: http://lichuanyang.top/posts/53791/
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.