System Thinking Notes - “Seeing Like an Org” Materials
Compiled insights for understanding how organizations “see” and operate through the lens of systems thinking, bureaucracy, organizational behavior, and biological systems.
Table of Contents
- Essential Systems Thinking
- Bureaucracy & State Theory
- Organizational Behavior
- Biological Systems & Evolution
- Synthesis: Seeing Like an Org
Essential Systems Thinking
Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
Core Concepts:
Systems Fundamentals:
- A system is more than the sum of its parts
- Many interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information
- The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior
- System structure is the source of system behavior
Stocks and Flows:
- A stock is the memory of the history of changing flows within the system
- Stocks act as delays, buffers, or shock absorbers in systems
- Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and independent
Feedback Loops:
- Balancing feedback loops are equilibrating or goal-seeking structures
- Reinforcing feedback loops are self-enhancing, leading to exponential growth or runaway collapses
- Complex behaviors often arise as the relative strengths of feedback loops shift
Key Insights:
“Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.”
“If a frog turns right and catches a fly, then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
The Fifth Discipline - Peter Senge
Systems Thinking in Organizations:
“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.‘”
System Archetypes:
Limits to Growth:
“For most American business people the best rate of growth is fast, faster, fastest. Yet, virtually all natural systems, from ecosystems to animals to organizations, have intrinsically optimal rates of growth.”
Compensating Feedback:
“Systems thinking has a name for this phenomenon: ‘Compensating feedback’: when well-intentioned interventions call forth responses from the system that offset the benefits of the intervention.”
Mental Models:
“The problems with mental models lie not in whether they are right or wrong—by definition, all models are simplifications. The problems with mental models arise when the models are tacit—when they exist below the level of awareness.”
A New Economics - Edward Deming
Systems and Quality:
“A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system.”
“Ranking is a farce. Apparent performance is actually attributable mostly to the system that the individual works in, not to the individual himself.”
Management Philosophy:
“Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.”
Systematics - John Gall
Fundamental System Laws:
“NEW SYSTEMS MEAN NEW PROBLEMS”
“SYSTEMS TEND TO OPPOSE THEIR OWN PROPER FUNCTIONS”
“THE BIGGER THE SYSTEM, THE NARROWER AND MORE SPECIALIZED THE INTERFACE WITH INDIVIDUALS”
Key Principles:
- Systems grow at 5-6% per annum regardless of workload
- Large systems produced by expanding smaller systems don’t behave like the smaller system
- Systems develop goals of their own the instant they come into being
- Any large system is going to be operating most of the time in failure mode
The Information Problem:
“THE INFORMATION YOU HAVE IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU WANT. THE INFORMATION YOU WANT IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU NEED. THE INFORMATION YOU NEED IS NOT THE INFORMATION YOU CAN OBTAIN.”
Personal Systems Notes
Systematics Principles:
- Everything is a system
- Everything is part of a larger system
- The universe is infinitely systematized, both upward and downward
- All systems are infinitely complex
Useful Principles:
- The purpose of a system is what it does (not what it says it does)
- Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
- Soviet Shoe Factory Principle: Systems optimize for what they measure, not what they intend
Bureaucracy & State Theory
Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
Core Argument - Four Elements of Disaster:
- The administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications
- A high-modernist ideology
- An authoritarian state willing to use coercive power
- A prostrate civil society that lacks capacity to resist
Legibility:
“The modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage.”
“Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society requires the invention of units that are visible.”
High Modernism:
“High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity.”
Metis (Practical Knowledge):
“Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability.”
Moral Mazes - Robert Jackall
Bureaucratic Ethic:
“Managers’ rules for survival and success are at the heart of what might be called the bureaucratic ethic, a moral code that guides managers through all the dilemmas and vicissitudes that confront them in the big organization.”
Organizational Rules for Survival:
- You never go around your boss
- You tell your boss what he wants to hear
- If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it
- You anticipate your boss’s wishes
- You cover up what your boss doesn’t want reported
Success Patterns:
“One way of looking at success patterns in the corporation is that the people who are in high positions have never been in one place long enough for their problems to catch up with them. They outrun their mistakes.”
The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy - Paul Schwartz
Three Approaches to Bureaucracy:
The Monkey - Probing and Learning:
“The Monkey probes and provokes, learns how the organization really works—its politics, dynamics, people’s hidden motivations—then uses those learnings as a lever to move the unmovable.”
The Razor - Cutting Away Waste:
“Don’t add extra work that doesn’t add value or choose the process that is leanest, given an equal amount of value delivered.”
The Sumo Wrestler - Using Force Against Force:
“The way of the Sumo Wrestler is to gain and use leverage by questioning the enforcers and examining the rules more closely.”
Key Laws:
- Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure
- McNamara Fallacy: Making decisions based only on quantitative factors
- Scott’s Law: Strong incentive to prefer precise and standardizable measures to highly accurate ones
Organizational Behavior
Peopleware - Tom DeMarco
The Human Reality:
“For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.”
“The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.”
Performance Differentials:
- Best people outperform worst by about 10:1
- Best performer is about 2.5 times better than median
- Better-than-median performers outdo the other half by more than 2:1
Teamicide Techniques:
- Defensive management
- Bureaucracy
- Physical separation
- Fragmentation of people’s time
- Quality reduction
- Phony deadlines
- Clique control
The Dictator’s Handbook - Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
The Five Rules of Politics:
- Keep your winning coalition as small as possible
- Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible
- Control the flow of revenue
- Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal
- Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better
Key Groups:
- Interchangeables: The nominal selectorate (all potential supporters)
- Influentials: The real selectorate (those who actually choose leaders)
- Essentials: The winning coalition (those whose support is essential)
Managing Humans - Michael Lopp
Management Reality:
“Management is a total career restart. The approaches they used for building products aren’t going to work when it comes to people.”
Communication Failures:
“The creation of information is the act of creating context and foundation when there is none. Call it a rumor or gossip, but what it really is is a reaction to a failure to communicate.”
Key Questions for Organizational Health:
- Do you have a one-on-one?
- Can you say no to your boss?
- Can you explain the strategy to a stranger?
- Do you have time to be strategic?
Biological Systems & Evolution
Serengeti Rules - Sean Carroll
The Serengeti Rules - How Biological Systems Work:
Keystone Species: Not all species are equal. Some species exert effects on the stability of the community that are not proportional to their biomass or numbers.
Trophic Cascades: Some species mediate strong indirect effects through food chain interactions.
Body Size Effects: Smaller animals are regulated by predators and larger animals by food supply.
Competition: Species that compete for common resources can regulate the abundance of other species.
Density Regulation: Regulation of some species depends upon their density.
Migration Effects: Migration increases animal numbers by increasing access to food and decreasing susceptibility to predation.
Key Insights:
“The cell adapts its work to its wants. It produces only what it needs when it needs it.” - Francis Jacob
“Predators affect/stabilize communities by negatively regulating the population densities of the competitively dominant species.”
A Story of Us - Lesley Newson & Peter Richerson
Human Evolution and Social Systems:
Cooperation vs Competition:
“Undoubtedly humans can be violently aggressive and capable of great brutality, but during our day-to-day interactions, we tend to be more docile and compliant than almost any other large animal.”
Cultural Evolution:
“Culture also provides some pretty spectacular curiosities—the pyramids of Egypt for example. Why did people living in the Nile Valley about 4,500 years ago spend so much time building these massive tombs? The answer may be a similar runaway mechanism. Positive feedback loops are also created as cultures evolve.”
Social Patterns:
“Experiments have shown that working with others affects children’s behavior. Afterward, they’re more generous in sharing any goodies—as if working with others has put them in a better mood.”
The Case Against Reality - Donald Hoffman
Fitness-Beats-Truth Theorem:
Core Argument:
“Evolution by natural selection entails a counterintuitive theorem: the probability is zero that we see reality as it is.”
“This book is about understanding how the world as we perceive it is not based on truth, but fitness. Fitness is the maximization of survivability.”
Perception vs Reality:
“Evolution shapes the perceptions of an organism to track fitness—not truth—as cheaply as possible given the demands of its niche.”
Interface Theory:
“Players of Minecraft grow ever more adept at dealing with its worlds. But they do so by mastering an interface, not by growing ever closer to the truth.”
Key Insight:
“Seeing everything through the lens of: ‘We are evolved to look at things this way,’ rather than ‘This is the way things are’ has drastically changed my perception of the world. Fitness beats the truth.”
The Evolution of Everything - Matt Ridley
Evolutionary vs Revolutionary Change:
Core Thesis:
“If there is one dominant myth about the world, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.”
System Evolution:
“Evolution originally meant unfolding.”
Economic Systems:
“Things will happen in a well-organized effort without direction, controls or plans. That’s the consensus among economists.” - Larry Summers
Anti-fragility:
“For the economy to be anti-fragile, the individual firms must be fragile. The restaurant business is robust because individual restaurants are short-lived and vulnerable.” - N.N. Taleb
Key Insights:
- Soviet-Harvard illusion: Lecturing birds on flight and thinking the lecture caused their skill
- Trade can be thought of as sex between ideas
- “A puppet is free so long as he loves his strings” - Sam Harris
Synthesis: Seeing Like an Org
From these materials, several key themes emerge about how organizations “see” and operate:
1. Simplification vs. Complexity
Organizations naturally tend toward simplification for the sake of legibility and control, but this often loses essential complexity and nuance. Like Scott’s high-modernist planners, organizations create simplified models that miss crucial details.
2. Measurement and Gaming
What gets measured gets managed, but also gets gamed. Organizations optimize for metrics rather than true outcomes, following Goodhart’s Law that “when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure.”
3. Information Flow and Distortion
Information gets filtered, distorted, and simplified as it moves through organizational hierarchies. The F.L.A.W. principle: “Things are what they are reported to be” - the system creates its own reality based on reports rather than actual conditions.
4. Power and Politics
Organizational behavior is fundamentally about power relationships and coalition building. The Dictator’s Handbook rules apply: keep your winning coalition small, control resources, and reward just enough to maintain loyalty.
5. Systems Thinking Gaps
Most organizational problems stem from system structure rather than individual failings, yet organizations consistently focus on fixing people rather than systems. As Deming noted, 85% of failures are system failures, not individual failures.
6. The Human Element
Despite all the systems and processes, organizations are fundamentally human systems. Peopleware reminds us that most project failures have no technological cause - they’re human and organizational failures.
7. Bureaucratic Necessity and Dysfunction
Some level of bureaucracy is necessary for coordination and control, but it develops its own goals and tends to oppose its proper function. Systems grow 5-6% annually regardless of workload and tend to malfunction conspicuously after their greatest triumphs.
8. Evolution vs Design
Like biological systems, organizational systems often evolve rather than being designed. They develop emergent properties and adapt to their environment, but this evolution optimizes for fitness (survival) rather than truth or effectiveness.
9. Interface vs Reality
Organizations, like our evolved perceptual systems, develop interfaces with reality rather than direct access to it. These interfaces are optimized for organizational fitness, not accuracy.
10. Feedback Loops and Cascades
Both biological and organizational systems are subject to trophic cascades - removing one element can have massive downstream effects. Understanding these cascade effects is crucial for organizational intervention.
Key Principles for “Seeing Like an Org”
- Organizations optimize for their own survival first, not their stated mission
- The interface is not the reality - what the organization “sees” is filtered and simplified
- Systems resist change and will oppose their own proper functioning
- Information flows upward poorly - leadership operates on simplified, delayed, and distorted information
- Power structures determine information flows more than formal reporting structures
- Measurement systems become the reality the organization responds to
- Local optimization often subverts global optimization
- Emergent behaviors arise from system structure, not individual intentions
- Feedback loops create unexpected consequences and can amplify small changes dramatically
- Bureaucracy is both necessary and pathological - it enables coordination but develops its own agenda
These insights provide a foundation for understanding how organizations develop their particular ways of “seeing” and why they often fail to perceive or respond appropriately to complex realities. The biological perspective adds crucial insights about how systems evolve, adapt, and sometimes develop features that optimize for fitness rather than function.