Below we highlight some of our favorite quotes by Donella Meadows.

While listeners will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth-the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet- Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.Meadows' newly released manuscript, Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for.

Speak the Truth
“Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough.”

Though I didn’t grow up on a farm…
“Though I didn’t grow up on a farm, I’ve been attracted to them all my life. When in 1972 I finally came to buy my own home, it was a farm. My psychological roots grew instantly into its cold, rocky soil. I have tried several times to leave it, reasoning that I could write more if I didn’t spend so much time shoveling manure, that I need to be where the political action is, that I’m not a very good farmer anyway, that New Hampshire is a terrible place to farm. But I’ve always come back. Something deep in me needs to be attached to a farm.”

How do we appreciate the good…
“How do we appreciate the good without letting it be the enemy of the perfect? How do we keep a step in the right direction from becoming a stopping point? How do we get beyond shades of insipid light green?”

On Joy
“It’s because of the people who are working toward sustainability, and because of my own experience, that I know how quickly the decision to go that direction, though it may start out with a feeling of sacrifice, turns into a lifetime of rejoicing.”

My writing
“My writing is a search for Truth.
It comes out of love.
It empowers; it does not judge
or accuse or rob anyone of
dignity or respect.
It is clear and precise.
The passage of my words through
the minds of others leaves them
more open, more thoughtful,
compassionate, committed to
Quality.
Every one of my readers is the Key
to the Workability of the Planet.
I give in my writing of myself
and my struggles unstintingly;
it is all I have to give; the
“I” of it is unimportant; it is
the universal humanness that
is important.
I write to ennoble others, not myself.”

Start thinking
“In the old electric system, it cost utilities less to subsidize our more efficient bulbs than to build another dinosaur power plant. In the deregulated system, they have only one incentive: to sell us as much power as possible at the lowest apparent price. So much for efficiency.Don’t set up the poor to bid against the rich. Don’t try to control prices in only one part of the system. Don’t hide real costs. Throw away comfortable myths about how the market will do everything for us and start thinking.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, January 18, 2001

The Good News
“So here’s the good news. A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world’s nations toward saving the climate, but an ignorant or servile president can’t stop committed nations, companies, or people from doing it anyway.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, November 30, 2000

Actions and Values
Dana, on driving her new Honda Insight car:
“Three weeks of information I never had before have changed 40 years of ingrained driving habits. I didn’t have to be coerced or rewarded; I didn’t have to change my values. I just had to see how my action did and did not conform to my values.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, May 4, 2000

The Earth has no way of registering good intentions…
“The Earth has no way of registering good intentions or future intentions or high hopes. It doesn’t even pay attention to dollars, which are, from a planet’s point of view, just a charming human invention. Planets measure only physical things – energy and materials and their flows into and out of the changing populations of living creatures.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, April 20, 2000

Freedom, stewardship, fidelity, family, community
“Freedom, stewardship, fidelity, family, community, all are casualties of a mechanism that selects only for cheapness and a narrowly measured efficiency that turns a living farm into a mechanized, chemicalized, one-product factory.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, June 3, 1999

Feeding the world…
“Biotech companies love to talk about feeding the world, but their products must pay off in the market, which measures dollar demand, not human need. The effort has gone into the potato that makes McDonald’s fries, not the yam eaten by folks with no cash. The corn that feeds America’s pigs and chickens, not the dryland millet that feeds Africa’s children.”
–Excerpt from the Global Citizen, March 25, 1999

On vision
“If we haven’t specified where we want to go, it is hard to set our compass, to muster enthusiasm, or to measure progress. But vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our culture. We talk easily and endlessly about our frustrations, doubts, and complaints, but we speak only rarely, and sometimes with embarrassment, about our dreams and values.”
–“Envisioning a Sustainable World”, Feb 12, 1996

I could see myself with fully gray hair…
In 1993 Dana did a visioning exercise in which she envisioned herself 10 years later:
“I could see myself with fully gray hair, looking vibrantly healthy. I was speaking in public. I was a constant presence in public discourse. I was calm and quiet, not flashy, not charismatic. My purpose was to insert into the discussion as much perspective, as broad a space horizon, as ethical a position as I could. My goal was to be clear, loving, wise.

I had no particular position or power, other than my willingness to show up and to speak truth. But – and here was the surprising and wonderful part – I was speaking from and for a community. This was a community in which I lived day to day. It was composed of people more clear, more loving, more wise, more spiritual than me. Together we studied and spoke about all the issues in public discourse and tried to work toward the clearest, most insightful position we could find. And then I was sent out (I was not the only one) to speak that position in public. The community prepared me for these appearances and critiqued them to help me do better next time. When I lost my way, when I got knocked off center, when I got scared or discouraged or angry, the community lovingly helped me find myself again.

I couldn’t see where I lived, on this farm [Foundation Farm in New Hampshire] or any farm, though it was clear to me that the community lived by the wisdom it preached. I did not see myself writing, only speaking. (That was weird. Maybe it was a recognition that hardly anyone reads any more.) As with every vision, I arched into the future without any concern about how to get there from here, so I have no idea whether I created this community, or found it somewhere and went to join it.

What I conclude is that I must find or create a group of people to live with who are dedicated to a just, peaceful and sustainable world, both in the way they live and in the way they reach out to impact the public discourse, the language, the context, the frame, the mindset of the larger community.

Well, who knows what will happen? I have a new vision now to work toward. Meanwhile, if there’s one more nice day outdoors I have raspberries to prune. If there isn’t, I have a basement to clean.”

A sustainable world
“I call the transformed world toward which we can move ‘sustainable,’ by which I mean a great deal more than a world that merely sustains itself unchanged. I mean a world that evolves, as life on earth has evolved for three billion years, toward ever greater diversity, elegance, beauty, self-awareness, interrelationship, and spiritual realization.”
–“Beyond the Limits”, speech given in Spain, Fall 1993

We have within us…
“We have within us the ability to wonder,
the intelligence to understand,
and the love to care about that which we wonder at.
I try to play to those abilities,
within myself and within others,
and in them I always find hope.”
–Dana Meadows wrote of her work in an online forum in 1992

Groping in the dark
“We do not need a computer model to tell us that:

• we must not destroy the system upon which our sustenance depends.
• poverty is wrong and preventable.
• the exploitation of one person or nation by another degrades both the exploited and the exploiter.
• it is better for individuals and nations to cooperate than to fight.
• the love we have for all humankind and for future generations should be the same as our love for those close to us.

If we do not embrace these principles and live by them, our system cannot survive. Our future is in our hands and will be no better or worse than we make it.

These messages have been around for centuries.
They reemerge periodically in different forms and now in the outputs of global models. Anything that persists for so long and comes from such diverse sources as gurus and input-output matrices must be coming very close to truth.

We all know the truth at some deep level within ourselves.
We have only to look honestly and deeply to find it.
And yet we don’t live as if we knew it.

Some of us actively deny messages like the one from the global models.
Others try very hard not to think about them.
Most of us
feel helpless, shrug our shoulders, wish things were otherwise,
assume that we can do nothing, and go on living.

Meanwhile, on this planet,
twenty-eight people starve to death each minute
one species of life disappears forever every day
and one million dollars are spent each minute on armaments.

The current condition of our globe is intolerable and we make it so.

It is changing because of what we decide.

Donella Meadows Thinking In Systems

It could be beautiful. If we would only
decide to get along together, be open to each other and to new ways of thinking,
remember what is really important to us, and what is less so,
and live our lives for that which is important.

As sophisticated, skeptical, scientific Westerners
We always react to statements like that by saying
It sounds too simple, and is in fact impossible.
How could we ever decide to get along together?
You don’t just decide things like that.
And how could we get everyone else to decide it?
(It couldn’t be possible that everyone else is just like us and is saying that same thing)

When everyone is so sophisticated
that they can’t believe it could be simple to be honest and to care

And everyone is so smart that they know they don’t count so they never try

You get the kind of world we’ve got.

Maybe it’s worth thinking another way
as if we cared and we made a difference,

Even if it’s just groping in the dark.”

–Excerpt from: Groping in the Dark, Donella Meadows, John Richardson, Gerhardt Bruckmann, (New York: Wiley), 1982, pp 289-291.

This is a remarkably readable introduction to systems thinking, a method to understand the inherent behavior of a system, and design appropriate interventions to change what the system is doing.

Meadows starts by defining a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. … a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections and a function or purpose.” So a system, in this definition, must contain parts that affect each other, and where those “parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own”. Note that “parts” could be humans, cells, objects, processes, etc. so this definition can cover lots of things – a system could be an organism, or organizations ranging in size from a family to a company to a country, or a population or an economy, or even the internal landscape of our minds. By studying the structure of a system, we have a potentially powerful tool to find leverage points to change how the system operates.

In the first chapter, she shares a key insight, which is that changing the elements of a system rarely changes the system’s behavior, as the interconnections (the feedback and incentives) will drive new elements to behave similarly in acting in accordance with the system’s purpose. The system’s structure overpowers the individuality of the elements. So a systems thinker must examine those interconnections and design new interconnections to change the behavior of a system; as she writes, “What makes a difference is redesigning the system to improve the information, incentives, disincentives, goals, stresses, and constraints that have an effect on [elements within the system]”. One might hope to change the system’s purpose rather than the interconnections, but for an existing system involving humans, that often requires a charismatic leader to change people’s minds (e.g. Ronald Reagan re-defining government as the problem, rather than the solution).

Meadows spends a chapter describing the mathematical modeling of systems thinking, which uses diagrams to map out stocks, the elements of a system “you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time”, and flows, the processes by which the stocks increase or decrease. Flows are generally managed via feedback, which can either take the form of balancing loops (which nudge stocks back to a stable set point) and reinforcing loops (which are runaway loops that spiral out of control, although they always encounter a balancing loop in the end, as there are always limits to growth). The fun part of this aspect of systems modeling is that those loops can interact with each other in unpredictable and unexpected ways (e.g. Senge’s Beer Game simulation)

To explain these concepts, Meadows takes the reader through a “Systems Zoo”, starting with a simple system where a thermostat turns the furnace on or off to maintain a certain temperature and ending with modeling a fishing economy, which can go drastically unstable if people overfish in the pursuit of profits, and exhaust the ability of the system/fish population to renew itself.

Part of what makes system thinking difficult is that systems do not exist in isolation, and therefore any systems analysis will be a model of reality where we choose what to include and exclude as part of the system. As Meadows notes, “It’s a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose.” The “relevant” parts of a system will change with each question we ask, so we must constantly refresh our view of the system.

Meadows spends a chapter of the book describing typical system traps that result from taking too narrow a view of a problem, and the potential way out of each trap. The solution is often counterintuitive for those already trapped e.g. when elements within a system are resisting a new policy, pushing harder on the new policy will only create greater resistance; the way out is to let go of the new policy, and bring the actors within the system together to find a mutually satisfactory path forward.

What will stick with me is the last chapter of the book where she describes how systems thinking has changed how she approaches life. Because everything is a dynamic, complex, interconnected set of systems and feedback loops, “We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate. It requires our full humanity – our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”

Donella Meadows Thinking In Systems A Primer

I love this description of living in a systems world – it’s not about calculating the optimal path forward, but choosing how we want to be in the world in each moment, and dancing our way into our future. It also echoes how my mentor coach describes coaching as dancing with the client, which makes perfect sense, since each person is a system of interconnected beliefs and desires and parts, of which some want to change, and others resist change.

She offers some lessons she’s learned from using systems thinking, including:

• “Get the Beat of the System” – understand the system and its interconnections before trying to change it. “We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”
• “Honor, Respect and Distribute Information” – systems work better when relevant information is delivered accurately and promptly to the actors within the system.
• “Pay Attention to What Is Important, Not Just What is Quantifiable” – if we manage only what we measure, we often miss the most important aspects of a system.
• “Locate Responsibility in the System” – make sure people within the system “will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions” e.g. place the outflow of a factory directly upstream of its inflow.
• “Stay Humble – Stay a Learner” – “What’s appropriate when you’re learning is small steps, constant monitoring, and a willingness to change course as you find out more.”
• “Defy the Disciplines”, which was music to my Unrepentant Generalist ears.

What’s remarkable to me is that Meadows originally wrote this manuscript in 1993, although it wasn’t released until 2008 after she died, and yet most of this book is entirely applicable today, showing the power and timelessness of systems thinking. For example, I wrote a LinkedIn post in June that included a line that could have come from Meadows: “By acting with integrity, and trying small experiments to see what resonates, you can create outsized impact within your network.” It seems like a lot of what I’ve been painstakingly learning over the past few years was written here decades ago – I just didn’t know about it, and wouldn’t have known how to apply it.

I loved reading this book, and plan to keep referring to it when I see a system that seems stuck. I will look for the traps keeping the system in an undesirable situation, and poke at the leverage points around feedback loops and information distribution to see what can shake the system into a new structure. This includes systems of my own thinking – my recent use of mantras is a way to disrupt and weaken the feedback loops that currently exist inside my head. I look forward to seeing how I can apply what I learned about systems thinking across my coaching and organizational work going forward.

Donella Meadows Thinking In Systems Summary