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Chapter 8Principles of System Design

 

The term “systems thinking” has become widespread in management science. But its origin is surprising and not widely known: It can be traced back to a cattle ranch in Nebraska in the 1920s. That's where the son of two homesteaders, Jay Forrester, grew up – a background he later credited with cultivating his practical mind. The restless young rancher didn't stay rooted in prairie soil for long. Instead, he found himself transplanted to a bustling laboratory in Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he discovered – and then transformed – the way we think about complexity itself.

Forrester was a true genius; complex systems always came easy to him. By the time he was a young MIT researcher in the 1940s, he was already tinkering with control and information systems for military equipment, and he invented an amazing array of innovations that have had profound impact on the world as we know it today. For example, the laboratory that he was part of created MIT's first general‐purpose digital computer. He also devised and patented an early version of RAM computer memory. And he led a division of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, which created computers for the North American air defense system from the later 1950s to the early 1980s.

But there was one type of system that Forrester found particularly befuddling: human systems. Thanks to the management roles that Forrester held at MIT's labs, he discovered that contrary to popular belief, managing ...