There’s a lot of turbulence in the world. What is the source of the turbulence? And how can we navigate skillfully? These questions were on my mind as I met with Harry to record episode 8 of the Traction Heroes podcast.
My (at least partial) answer to the first question is that there’s a general lack of systems literacy in the world. Most people aren’t aware of the high degree of complexity that characterizes highly intertwingled systems such as modern economies. As a result, they opt for simplistic interventions that often do more harm than good.
At least that was my hypothesis. I was keen to hear Harry’s thoughts — and he didn’t disappoint. My prompt was the following passage from Donella Meadows’s classic Thinking in Systems: A Primer (emphasis in the original):
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents—preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.
Of course, the broader context was (and is) on my mind. But we’re all enmeshed in complex systems in our day-to-day lives. It behooves us to ponder whether the causes of problems are really “out there” — or whether, as Harry suggested, we need to be more introspective.