Systems Thinking Archetypes

Many in my audience are familiar with Systems Engineering (and that is my own background), but a potentially more important topic is Systems Thinking, which is distinct from Engineering.

I leverage in particular, The Fifth Discipline - Wikipedia by Peter Senge, and it forms the core of my teaching, speaking, and writing. While Systems Engineering emphasizes a decomposition approach (which I posit results in dysfunction), Systems Thinking looks at feedback loops, specifically:

• Reinforcing feedback: in which growth encourages even more growth, and
• Balancing feedback, in which growth either generates a counteracting force, or simply runs out of resources.

Combining the feedback loops into meaningful archetypes is very useful in understanding system behavior (e.g., in 2020, as COVID became a pandemic, I realized I was predicting the news by anywhere from 18 hours to 18 months.) I cover three important archetypes here:

• Limits to Growth: in which reinforcing growth is limited by a balancing loop, and we saw this in the growth and eventual decline of COVID-19
• Shifting the Burden: in which we over-rely on what turns out to be a symptomatic solution, rather than a more time-consuming and costly fundamental solution. An example of this is the supply chain collapses seen beginning in 2021.
• Tragedy of the Commons: In which independent actors optimize their own reinforcing growth, without recognizing that they are consuming a common supply of resources. (This is analogous to the other dysfunctions found in decomposition approaches.)

All of these archetypes are useful in understanding how we may be impacting the climate around us, and the lecture makes comparisons between the archetypes and climate change.