THE TRAP: SUCCESS TO THE SUCCESSFUL If the winners of a competition are systematically rewarded with the means to win again, a reinforcing feedback loop is created by which, if it is allowed to proceed uninhibited, the winners eventually take all, while the losers are eliminated.

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

The alternative to overpowering policy resistance is so counterintuitive that it’s usually unthinkable. Let go. ... If you calm down, those who are pulling against you will calm down too.

You hit me, so I hit you back a little harder, so you hit me back a little harder, and pretty soon we have a real fight going. “I’ll raise you one” is the decision rule that leads to escalation. Escalation comes from a reinforcing loop set up by competing actors trying to get ahead of each other.

the growth of the bank account at lower interest rates may look linear in the first few years. But, in fact, growth goes faster and faster. The more is there, the more is added.

The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. ... That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.”

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.

It’s because she is struggling to operate in a system in which she doesn’t have, and can’t have, timely information and in which physical delays prevent her actions from having an immediate effect on inventory. ... When she issues an order, she doesn’t see an immediate response. This situation of information insufficiency and physical delays is very common.

Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property. ... (Cattle breeding over centuries has done much the same thing but not to the same degree.) The cost of increased production is lowered resilience.

After years of working with corporations on their systems problems, MIT’s Jay Forrester likes to say that the average manager can define the current problem very cogently, identify the system structure that leads to the problem, and guess with great accuracy where to look for leverage points—places in the system where a small change could lead to a large shift in behavior. This idea of leverage points is not unique to systems analysis—it’s embedded in legend: the silver bullet; the trimtab; the miracle cure; the secret passage; the magic password; the single hero who turns the tide of history; the nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them.

You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not-knowing. In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

There are always limits to resilience. ... Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.

Some systems not only resist policy and stay in a normal bad state, they keep getting worse. One name for this archetype is “drift to low performance.” Examples include falling market share in a business, eroding quality of service at a hospital, continuously dirtier rivers or air, increased fat in spite of periodic diets, the state of America’s public schools—or my onetime jogging program, which somehow just faded away. ... The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system’s performance. Another name for this system trap is “eroding goals.” It is also called the “boiled frog syndrome,” from the old story (I don’t know whether it is true) that a frog put suddenly in hot water will jump right out, but if it is put into cold water that is gradually heated up, the frog will stay there happily until it boils.

Therefore, any physical, growing system is going to run into some kind of constraint, sooner or later. That constraint will take the form of a balancing loop that in some way shifts the dominance of the reinforcing loop driving the growth behavior, either by strengthening the outflow or by weakening the inflow.

On the one hand, we have been taught to analyze, to use our rational ability, to trace direct paths from cause to effect, to look at things in small and understandable pieces, to solve problems by acting on or controlling the world around us. That training, the source of much personal and societal power, leads us to see presidents and competitors, OPEC and the flu and drugs as the causes of our problems.