Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The classic book on systems thinking--with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!

"This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."--Forbes

"Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."--Hunter Lovins

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.

Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world--war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation--are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.

While readers 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. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.

In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Just before her death, scientist, farmer and leading environmentalist Meadows (1941-2001) completed an updated, 30th anniversary edition of her influential 1972 environmental call to action, Limits to Growth, as well as a draft of this book, in which she explains the methodology-systems analysis-she used in her ground-breaking work, and how it can be implemented for large-scale and individual problem solving. With humorous and commonplace examples for difficult concepts such as a "reinforcing feedback loop," (the more one brother pushes, the more the other brother pushes back), negative feedback (as in thermostats), accounting for delayed response (like in maintaining store inventory), Meadows leads readers through the increasingly complex ways that feedback loops operate to create self-organizing systems, in nature ("from viruses to redwood trees") and human endeavor. Further, Meadows explicates methods for fixing systems that have gone haywire ("The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth .but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction"). An invaluable companion piece to Limits to Growth, this is also a useful standalone overview of systems-based problem solving, "a simple book about a complex world" graced by the wisdom of a profound thinker committed to "shap[ing] a better future." (Dec.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

CHOICE Review

Meadows, known for authoring The Limits to Growth (CH, Nov'73) and its sequel The 30-Year Update, with Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows (CH, Nov'04, 42-1517), died while completing this book. It begins by explaining that a system is a set of things interconnected in such a way that they give rise to their own intertemporal pattern of behavior. Readers then learn about stocks, flows, and feedback loops. In particular, the reinforcing feedback loop is very salient because it is self-enhancing and hence frequently leads either to exponential growth or eventual collapse. Meadows notes that most systems work well because they are resilient, self-organized, and hierarchical. Even so, systems will often surprise us because many relationships in systems are nonlinear. She concludes with a plea to use language carefully and to pay attention to what is salient and not just to what can be quantified. This book contains some quixotic aspects, e.g., the concept of profit is referred to as a rule and not an objective, and the claim that economists model "technology as magic," which is patently false in most contemporary economic models of technology. Despite these oddities, this is an accessible introduction to systems for nonspecialists. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers and all levels of undergraduate students. A. A. Batabyal Rochester Institute of Technology