Nothing new under the sun

Sitting on the beach in Tulum reading about systems I was pleased that both books began to describe similar patterns that can be found throughout all systems. A bit more depth would have been nice, but at least the authors aren't complete idiots. Capra, again failed to impress when talking about his own ideas. I did like his description of the pattern of life as being a network capable of self organisation, but I felt he could have gone into much more depth describing the details of the network pattern and how it can be seen in the diversity of systems that we see everyday. For example, what are the different aspects of life's network and how can we distinguish one part of the pattern from another when we look so closely that the system becomes almost unrecognizable in terms of where it sits relative to the whole?

He did do a good job of continuing to describe the evolution of systems thinking. I particularly enjoyed the description of the original experiment in the 1950's that led to the discovery of self-organisation. It reminded me a lot of the Wolfram Alpha project and their efforts to discover the ultimate systemic pattern that gave rise to life, the universe, and everything in it. Hearing the story of the experiment makes me think about what could lead to self-organisation. Given the right parameters, we can get a system that unfolds in complexity on towards infinity, i.e. the universe, but what are those parameters? How did they get set initially?

I also really enjoyed the description by Meadows about some of the systems "traps and opportunities" that she has identified. I found this chapter to be particularly helpful in understanding the role of systems thinking in a leadership position. Obviously implementing solutions to systems traps is more difficult the bigger the system is, such as a national government, or else we would see far fewer systemic problems and manny more solutions being implemented successfully. It seems that implementing solutions is much more an art than a science. Perhaps at some level of understanding, one could grasp the interconnections of a system as large as our national government and know exactly, with mathematic certainty, what is needed to achieve a desired impact, but that seems likely out of the realm of the human intellect to handle. Perhaps if decision makers can raise their individual level of consciousness they could potentially make decisions that bring about the best possible outcome, but that seems a long way off. Even finding the root cause of one problem is hard enough, let alone understanding how "fixing" it will effect avery other part of the system.