The authors number one recommended book is ~166 pages in total. I skimmed through and it's mostly pictures. The blog also contained no data. This is all completely fine, but it rubs me the wrong way when things are posed as scientific or rigorous, but are mostly subjective opinion pieces. I like to see what "thinking in systems" gets me with real evidence. I appreciate they took the time to create and share this though.
Donatella Meadows created real impact wherever she went.
You might also want to look into real-life studies of efficiency and safety by people such as Deming, Weinberg, Womack, Leveson, Dekker, Shewhart, Hollnagel, Ward, etc. There plenty of evidence that it works, even if Meadow's more popular book isn't filled with references.
I read the book twice. I walked away feeling the same as OP. I would appreciate it a lot of you have any other reference material on this, any book or resource that convinced you or helped you. I feel I'm close to grasping the underlying reasoning and benefits, but think I am missing a slightly different angle on this.
I lent my copy to my brother over a decade ago. Still haven't got it back...
Also Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design by Donald Gause and Gerald Weinberg. Really useful advice about questions to ask people to understand what the system really does/should do.
I read Thinking in Systems a few years ago, in part because Bill Gates recommended it. (I had seen it elsewhere too, probably on Hacker News.)
As I recall, there are problems with the book, because the author actually passed away before it was finished.
The biggest problem IMO is that it doesn't adequately address modeling error. It barely mentions it at all. It simply introduces models that were simulated on a computer, and talks about their consequences. And I remember there being a tenuous connection to the original research, which is notable because I believe the author's group did a lot of it.
So I would be interested in some other high level / overview books on the same subject. I'm not sure I got a lot out of this book. I think the main thesis was to focus on "points of leverage" when trying to change systems. I think it is valuable to hammer that point home, but it's hardly novel, and it wasn't justified with practice. I felt like it was too focused on simulations, and confused the simulations with reality.
Someone always has to come with this particular middle-brow dismissal whenever anything subjective gets posted to HN. Not that I think this is the most brilliant article, but like most things in general-purpose high-level software engineering management, the ideas presented are not quantifiable or specific enough to be tractable for rigorous scientific exploration, you just have to consider them within the framework of your own expertise and experience. Trying to force a data-driven approach on top chaotic human systems where the inputs and outputs themselves are vague and subjective is a quick path to the McNamara Fallacy and other management theory quackery.
We're in complete agreement then. The data-driven approach need not be applied to everything. My point was subjectivity trying to chalk itself up as rigorous using scientific sounding terms simply rubs me the wrong way.
What does your current way of thinking get you? Do you have tangible evidence for that? Not just "it's my way of thinking, and I create output, therefore", but the causal relationship you demand from this book?
"How to think" is always subjective, and additional ways to think get us additional tools in our toolbox. I'd strongly recommend you at least skim the book, and see if it's applicable to your world of problems. (It's 166 pages and "mostly pictures", so it should be a quick read - and it only needs to make minimal impact to repay the time you spent)
If it was so short, why you just skimmed through it?
You are seeing a few parts (titles, maybe a paragraph or two, a sample of the diagrams and pictures) and you are not seeing the system behind it. You have to read it whole to properly understand its point.
And as that system is not isolated from the world, after you understanding it you will get a good hint of the outer system, things that are happening in the real world outside of it.
judging the quality of the book by number of pages or picture vs word density is like judging the quality of a program by line of code. i'm sure you know this, just gently reminding you of the natural bias we all have
