(Twitter is great. This week I had some great back and forths with Jacob Singh about normalizing being idle. He cranked out a wonderful post that you should check out called The Case for Slacking Off at Work. I took a different approach.) Ask an executive “do you think we should optimize for keeping people
Meadows' places to intervene are somewhat flawed in human systems. Firstly, it is highly unethical to act directly on people's mindsets (or paradigms). Secondly, we must bear in mind that explicit goals undermine implicit motivation. Lastly, I would reframe interventions on feedback loops as amplifying working probes and dampening failing ones.
Yes, because she didn't just advocate showing the deficiencies of the current mindset, she also suggested replacing it with a specific target mindset. In contradiction of herself, she also recognized that no single paradigm can be held as the "true" one.
It is the great error of systems thinking in general, which Meadows also made in particular, that we can and should define the desired future state of a system.
Hi :) I just wanted to say thanks for this post, it was shared with me a couple of years ago and I am still (mostly to no avail) sending it to people in my organization.
I also wanted to let you know that the link to "Places to Intervene in a System" at the end is broken.
Just to let you know there's a more recent version of Meadow's "Places to intervene in a system" in her book Thinking in Systems : https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf starting from page 145
Meadows' places to intervene are somewhat flawed in human systems. Firstly, it is highly unethical to act directly on people's mindsets (or paradigms). Secondly, we must bear in mind that explicit goals undermine implicit motivation. Lastly, I would reframe interventions on feedback loops as amplifying working probes and dampening failing ones.
Does she suggest doing those unethical things?
Yes, because she didn't just advocate showing the deficiencies of the current mindset, she also suggested replacing it with a specific target mindset. In contradiction of herself, she also recognized that no single paradigm can be held as the "true" one.
It is the great error of systems thinking in general, which Meadows also made in particular, that we can and should define the desired future state of a system.
Hi :) I just wanted to say thanks for this post, it was shared with me a couple of years ago and I am still (mostly to no avail) sending it to people in my organization.
I also wanted to let you know that the link to "Places to Intervene in a System" at the end is broken.
Great post, thank you so much John!
Just to let you know there's a more recent version of Meadow's "Places to intervene in a system" in her book Thinking in Systems : https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf starting from page 145
+1