Link: Systems Thinking Is Brain Rot for Analysts
Timber Stinson-Schroff:
If I have a regret, or a cautionary tale, it might be reading Thinking In Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows. Meadows was apparently a wonderful woman, and she wrote a solid book. But if you’re a twenty-one year old desk jockey, like I was, systems thinking is basically a hard drug. Books like Meadows’, or The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, to name another example, will juice you up with a dangerous amount of hubris and delusion about your agency. Why? Well, it’s one thing to know where to look for leverage points in a system (places where you can make a lot of change without a lot of effort, basically). But there are some complicating factors…
This is an interesting take — that Systems Thinking is not good for young analysts, not because the ideas are wrong, but because it makes the said analysts misjudge their abilities and influence. I haven’t seen much commentary that doesn’t deride an idea but warns a certain group of people of its dangers.