You too will be able to take a subject, any subject, and hype it to the point where it bears no resemblance to reality. Whomever you write about will never be able to live up to what you write about him, but never mind. The important thing is that people will talk about YOUR STORY. They will talk about it for years.
You too will be able to take a subject, any subject, and hype it to the point where it bears no resemblance to reality. Whomever you write about will never be able to live up to what you write about him, but never mind. The important thing is that people will talk about YOUR STORY. They will talk about it for years.
Saved by Tanuj and
Numbers, the sizes of flows, are dead last on my list of powerful interventions. Diddling with the details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably 90—no 95, no 99 percent—of our attention goes to parameters, but there’s not a lot of leverage in them. It’s not that parameters aren’t important—they can be, especially in the short term and
... See moreIt’s obvious to ask what’s wrong, so also ask: how did we get here, where are we headed, and what is still working well? ‘Don’t be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities,’ she warned. ‘Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.’49
The practice of systems thinking starts with understanding a simple concept called “feedback” that shows how actions can reinforce or counteract (balance) each other. It builds to learning to recognize types of “structures” that recur again and again:
Usually when we find trillion-dollar bills lying on the ground in real life, it’s a symptom of (1) a central-command bottleneck that nobody else is allowed to fix, as with the European Central Bank wrecking Europe, or (2) a system with enough moving parts that at least two parts are simultaneously broken, meaning that single actors cannot defy the
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