Donella Meadows

Harmonization of goals in a system is not always possible, but it’s an worth looking for. It can be found only by letting go of more narrow goals and considering the long term welfare of the entire system.

The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.

Being less surprised by complex systems is mainly a matter of learning to expect, appreciate, and use the world’s complexity.

The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state.

Drift to low performance is a gradual process. If the system state plunged quickly, there would be an agitated corrective process. But if it drifts down slowly enough to erase the memory of (or belief in) how much better things used to be, everyone is lulled into lower and lower expectations, lower effort, lower performance.

The better things get, the harder I’m going to work to make them even better.

Success to the successful is a well-known concept in the field of ecology, where it is called “the competitive exclusion principle.” This principle says that two different species cannot live in exactly the same ecological niche, competing for exactly the same resources.

Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem.

Design, or redesign, rules to release creativity not in the direction of beating the rules, but in the direction of achieving the purpose of the rules.

These examples confuse effort with result, one of the most common mistakes in designing systems around the wrong goal.