Weekly Book Club 006 (Exclusive) -- Thinking in System

(The English version follows)

在上一期 Weekly Book Club 中，我们提到创业其实是创立一个系统，创立一个流程。如果想要了解系统是什么，系统如何构建，Thinking in System 是一本很不错的入门书籍，所以本期 Weekly Book Club 的推荐就是这本书。

Clouds stand for the beginnings and ends of flows. They are stocks—sources and sinks—that are being ignored at the moment for the purposes of simplifying the present discussion.

Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model.

The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.

Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.

System structure is the source of system behavior. System behavior reveals itself as a series of events over time.

To make things worse, water leaking out of the hole is governed by a feedback loop; the more water in the bucket, the more the water pressure at the hole increases, so the flow out increases!

Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction.

Stocks generally change slowly, even when the flows into or out of them change suddenly. Therefore, stocks act as delays or buffers or shock absorbers in systems.

Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be independent and temporarily out of balance with each other.

Balancing feedback loops are goal>seeking or stability>seeking.

But the intervention can become a system trap. A corrective feedback process within the system is doing a poor (or even so>so) job of maintaining the state of the system.

Resilient systems can be very dynamic. Short>term oscillations, or periodic outbreaks, or long cycles of succession, climax, and collapse may in fact be the normal condition, which resilience acts to restore!

Any physical entity with multiple inputs and outputs is surrounded by layers of limits.

In chemistry and other fields, a big, stabilizing stock is known as a buffer.

You can often stabilize a system by increasing the capacity of a buffer. But if a buffer is too big, the system gets inflexible.