What a Slinky Can Teach Us About System Design
I want to share this story because it contains a powerful systems insight that took me a couple of re-reads to get.
Donella Meadows writes in Thinking in Systems:
Early on in teaching about systems, I often bring out a Slinky. In case you grew up without one, a Slinky is a toy—a long, loose spring that can be made to bounce up and down, or pour back and forth from hand to hand, or walk itself downstairs.
I perch the Slinky on one upturned palm. With the fingers of the other hand, I grasp it from the top, partway down its coils. Then I pull the bottom hand away. The lower end of the Slinky drops, bounces back up again, yo-yos up and down, suspended from my fingers above.
“What made the Slinky bounce up and down like that?” I ask students.
“Your hand. You took away your hand,” they say.
So I pick up the box the Slinky came in and hold it the same way, poised on a flattened palm, held from above by the fingers of the other hand. With as much dramatic flourish as I can muster, I pull the lower hand away.
Nothing happens. The box just hangs there, of course. “Now once again. What made the Slinky bounce up and down?” The answer clearly lies within the Slinky itself.
The hands that manipulate it suppress or release some behavior that is latent within the structure of the spring.
That is a central insight of systems theory.
The central insight is that the behaviour of a system is often times latent/hidden/stored within the structure of the system and is not necessarily caused by the things we think it causes.
Yes the hand or the box do manipulate or suppress some of the behaviour, but that behaviour is caused by the structure of the slinky (system).
She continues:
When it comes to Slinkies, this idea is easy enough to understand. When it comes to individuals, companies, cities, or economies, it can be heretical. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a differ- ent system is likely to produce a different result.
She reasons through some of the pretty wild implications if you ask me:
Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:
- Political leaders don’t cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.
- Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business policies.
- The oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil- price rises. Their actions alone could not trigger global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, pricing, and investment policies of the oil-importing nations had not built economies that are vulnerable to supply interruptions.
- The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.
- Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through under- standing addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.
Comments