Systemic Thinking Quotes

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

You can never solve a problem on the same level as the problem.

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

I think it's really important to look at the big picture instead of just one competition.

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.

Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men do.

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken.

If you you think there is a solution, you're part of the problem.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

My philosophy comes from a worldview that looks at the world as one. It's a holistic view that sees the world as interconnected and interdependent and integrated in so many different ways, which informs my politics.

My right wrist is connected to the left foot. You know, if the left foot doesn't work, the right wrist doesn't work, and that's really the truth.

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress.

Things explain each other, not themselves.

You don't filter smokestacks or water. Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.