Donella Meadows Quotes

Expand the boundary of caring.

If I could, I would add an Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information.

The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.

A delay in a balancing feedback loop makes the system likely to oscillate.

When there are long delays in feedback loops, some sort of foresight is essential.

A quantity growing exponentially toward a limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.

Systems thinking can only tell us to do these things. It can't do them for us. And so we are brought to the gap between understanding and implementation. Systems thinking by itself cannot bridge that gap. But it can lead us to the edge of what analysis can do and then point beyond—to what can and must be done by the human spirit.

The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can't surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them.

A system is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. [...] The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior!