If you’d like to know more about some of the characteristics of systems and of our own minds that makes it difficult to understand systems and to make good decisions about them, use these links to read useful sections from Dӧrner. Click on the link you want to go to the section of Dӧrner’s work that covers the topic.
What conditions exist in the systems in our world that make them hard to understand?
§ Complexity and the difference in complexity with and without experience
§ Interrelationships with their "side effects and long-term repercussions" and changes of the whole over time
What characteristics of ourselves and of information make a difference in success with systems?
§ Assumptions, recognized and not
§ Information without methods to know what it "means" overload
The use of these quotations does not indicate Dietrich Dörner's endorsement of the content on this webpage. Previously, Dörner gave permission to use these quotations as a resource for others. I have sent an email request to use these quotations here. If he does not agree, we will, of course, remove these quotations immediately.
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Quotation from Dietrich Dörner's Logic
of Failure |
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…we face an array of closely¾though often subtly¾linked problems. The modern world is made up of
innumerable interrelated subsystems, and we need to think in terms of these
interrelations. In the past, such considerations were less important. What
did the growth of [In the past], [t]he need to see a problem embedded in the
context of other problems rarely arose. For us, however, this is the rule,
not the exception. Do our habits of
thought measure up to the demands of thinking in systems? What errors are we
prone to when we have to take side effects and long-term repercussions into
account? [bold added] |
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All are, at least in part, “intransparent”; one cannot see
everything one would like to see. And all develop independent of external
control, according to their own internal dynamic. |
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Complexity is the
label we will give to the existence of many interdependent variables in a
given system. The more variables and the greater their interdependence, the
greater that system’s complexity. Greater complexity places high demands on a
planner’s capacities to gather information, integrate findings, and design
effective actions. The links between the variables oblige us to attend to a great
many features simultaneously, and that, concomitantly, makes it impossible
for us to undertake only one action in a complex system. |
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A system of variables is “interrelated” if an action that
affects or is meant to affect one part of the system will also always affect
other parts of it. Interrelated guarantees that an action aimed at one
variable will have side effects
and long-term repercussions. A
large number of variables will make it easy to overlook them. [bold added] |
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Complexity is not an objective factor but a subjective one.
Take, for example, the everyday activity of driving a car.… The main
difference between these two individuals [the beginner and the experienced driver]
is that the experienced driver reacts to many “supersignals.” For her, a
traffic situation is not made up of a multitude of elements that must be
interpreted individually. It is a “gestalt”… Supersignals reduce complexity, collapsing a number of features
into one, |
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The dynamics inherent in systems make it important to
understand developmental tendencies. We cannot content ourselves with
observing and analyzing situations at any single moment but must instead try to determine where the whole system
is heading over time. For many people this proves to be an extremely
difficult task. [bold added] |
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[Gives |
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If we want to operate within a complex and dynamic system,
we have to know not only what its current status is but what its status will
be or could be in the future, and we have to know how certain actions we take
will influence the situation. For this we need “structural knowledge,”
knowledge of how the variables in a system are related and how they influence
one another.” |
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The totality of such assumptions in an individual’s mind¾assumptions
about the simple or complex links and the one-way or reciprocal influences
between variable¾constitute
what we call that individual’s “reality model.” A reality model may be
explicit, always available to the individual in a conscious form, or it can
be implicit, with the individual himself unaware that he is operating on a
certain set of assumptions and unable to articulate what those assumptions
are. |
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[W]e could liken a decision maker in a complex situation of
a chess player whose set has many more than the normal number of pieces,
several dozen, say. Furthermore, these chessmen are all linked to each other
by rubber bands, so that the player cannot move just one figure alone. Also,
his men and his opponent’s men can move on their own and in accordance with
the rules the player does not fully understand or about which he has mistaken
assumptions. And, to top things off, some of his own and his opponent’s men
are surrounded by a fog that obscures their identity. |
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44 |
And it is not just the normal citizen who lacks time to
gather information. Politicians faced with the need to make a decision will rarely
have time to digest even readily available information, much less to pursue
new lines of inquiry. |
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We are constantly deciding how much information is enough.…
We need, of course, to do more with information than simply gather it. We need to arrange it into an overall
picture, a model of the reality we are dealing with. [bold added]
Formless collections of data about random aspects of a situation merely add
to the situation’s impenetrability and are no aid to decision making. We need
a cohesive picture that lets us determine what is important and what
unimportant, what belongs together and what does not¾in short, that tells us what
our information means. This kind of
“structural knowledge” will allow us to find order in apparent chaos.” |
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A system is a network of many variables in causal
relationships to one another. |
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86-87 |
One basic error accounts for all catastrophes: none of the
participants realized that they were dealing with a system in which, though
not every element interacted with every other, many elements interacted with
many others.… They did not take into account the side effects and
repercussions of certain measures. They dealt with the entire system, not as a system but as a bundle of
independent minisystems. And dealing with systems in this way breeds trouble:
if we do not concern ourselves with the problems we do not have, we soon have
them. |
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87- 88 |
At the moment, we don’t have other problems, so why think about
them? Or, to put it better still, why think that we should think about them? Another reason is informational overload. Participants are
given a lot of information, and to solve their problems, the have to gather a
lot of data and address many aspects of the situation. There just doesn’t
seem to be time enough to worry about problems that are not immediately
pressing. |
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One excellent way to maintain a hypothesis indefinitely is
to ignore information that does not conform to it.… We are infatuated with
the hypotheses we propose because we assume they give us power over things.
We therefore avoid exposing them to the harsh light of real experience, and
we prefer to gather only information that supports our hypotheses. |
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107- 109 |
We live and act in a four-dimensional system. In addition
to the three dimensions of space, this system includes the fourth dimension
of time, which moves in one direction, and that direction is toward the
future…. We rarely have trouble dealing with configurations in space. If
we’re not entirely sure of what we’re looking at, we can take another look
and resolve our uncertainty. We can normally look at forms in space again and
again and in this way precisely determine their particular configuration.
That is not true of configurations in time. A time configuration is available
for examination only in retrospect. … Because we are constantly presented with whole spatial
configurations, we readily think in such terms. … By contrast, we often overlook time configurations and
treat successive steps in a temporal development as individual events. |
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Children, and many an adult, will be amazed at the answer to the following problem. There is one water lily growing in a pond with a surface area of 130,000 square feet. In early spring, the lily has one pad, and each lily pad has a surface area of one square foot. After a week, the lily has two pads, after the following week, four pads. After sixteen weeks the pond is half covered. How much longer will it take before the whole pond is covered? [The answer: if constant growth, “only one more week.” Dörner covers other examples, including AIDS, and experiments.] A quantity is said to be growing “exponentially” when its value at any time … is its previous value multiplied by a particular number, the same number each time. … In a linear process, a quantity increases by the same amount, not the same multiple, at each step. … A number of psychological experiments have demonstrated that an incapacity to deal with nonlinear time configurations is a general phenomenon. Clearly, … people tend to badly misjudge non-linear [exponential] growth. |
For who Dörner
is and the basics about systems and systems thinking, click here.
For all of the quotations from The Logic
of Failure and these topics, click here:
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