Articles and Essays
- “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” by Donella Meadows (PDF)
This is the most important article I’ve ever read, in terms of making strategic change.- See also “Dancing with Systems“
Books
- I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella Meadows
- Managing the Unexpected, by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe
- Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell
- Making Sense of Behavior: The Meaning of Control, by William T. Powers
- The Systems Bible, by John Gall (or follow @SysQuotes!)
- The Web of Life, by Fritjof Capra
- Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts, by Philip Ball
- Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory, by Joanna Macy
Interactive tools
- Loopy, by Nicky Case (more info)
- An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes, by Nicky Case
- Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction, by Bret Victor
Articles
- “Creating some slack” – a very useful model of households as ecosystems
Timeline
If you’re interested in an expansive and detailed timeline of “Systems thinking and resilience” that I made in 2013, you can view it below or here. There are about 200 slides, and if you want to skip to a general section:
- 1-29: Deep time, evolution, and early humans
- 30-52: Ancient Greece to 1800s
- 53-72: 1900 to 1940s
- 73-155: 1950s to 1980s
- 156-180 : 1990s
- 181-208: 2000-2013
- 209: Zoom out to the whole shape
- 210-213: A few pages of discussion
