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🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

✍️ Top Quotes From the Book

• 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.