![critique of donella meadows thinking in systems critique of donella meadows thinking in systems](https://www.briansnotes.io/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/thinking-in-systems-350x350.jpg)
our models fall far short of representing the world fully.That is why we are such a successful species … Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world.None of these is or ever will be the real world. … So are the ways I picture the world in my head – my mental models. Every world and every language is a model. Everything we think we know about the world is a model.Why use systems at all? In a good passage, which I’ve shortened here, she writes about the way we understand the world: And the third section explores what we should do to use some systems knowledge to improve policy and management decisions. A second section looks at how systems work, but told through examples and stories. A first section runs through the main systems concepts (stocks and flows, time graphs, and reinforcing and balancing loops).
![critique of donella meadows thinking in systems critique of donella meadows thinking in systems](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/eb/33/00/eb330029e0d44b24c395f6193923c7d5.png)
Thinking in Systems effectively unfolds in three parts. But the book seems to have surfaced with little fanfare, and barely a review. It is, I’d say, the best single introduction to systems work that is available, especially for non-specialists. In the circumstances, it ought to be something of a publishing event, even if a niche one. Now her colleague Diana Wright has edited it for publication. The manuscript of ‘ Thinking in systems‘ has been around in draft since the early ’90s, but never completed. At barely thirty, she was the lead author of ‘ Limits to Growth‘ and she remained an influential voice in the sustainability movement until her relatively early death in 2001 – which for me at least recalled an Adrian Mitchell couplet, ‘And God killed Aneurin Bevan/ And let Harold Wilson survive’. Donella (‘Dana’) Meadows was almost certainly the most influential systems thinker of her generation.