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# Thinking in Systems
- URL: https://www.mainfrank.com/notes/book-thinking-in-systems/
- Published: 2026-08-10T14:50:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T20:56:08.000Z
- Description: Donella Meadows, 2008
- Author: Frank Burridge
- Tags: #book, Green School BiRD Lab, Gili Meno Zero

Stocks, flows, feedback and delays are a working grammar for everything the practice touches. Persistent problems are patterns generated by structure. The deep levers sit in who gets information and in what a system is actually for. Our buildings are designed as feedback instruments because of this book.

## Core thesis

Problems persist because they are generated by structure. Behaviour emerges from stocks, flows, feedback loops, and delays. Intervene at symptoms and the structure routes around you. Lasting change means shifting information flows, rules, or goals.

## What it unlocks in practice

Before any design response we identify the accumulating stock, trace dominant feedback loops, and locate where information is missing or delayed. On Gili Meno this meant mapping water, waste, and revenue as interdependent stocks. The masterplan’s phasing follows directly: which reinforcing loops activate first (mangrove biomass, guest confidence), which balancing loops kill momentum if ignored (regulatory lag, freshwater depletion). At Jugil TPST, BSF larvae populations are a stock with biological delays that dictate facility throughput. Design the buffer before the building.

## Watch out for

The book can make you feel fluent in systems without ever quantifying one. Causal loop diagrams are easy to draw, hard to validate. "Shift the paradigm" is not an architectural instruction. If your systems thinking never produces a number or a falsifiable prediction, it’s philosophy cosplaying as method.

## Project relevance

Gili Meno masterplan: phasing and infrastructure logic from stock-flow-feedback mapping. BiRD Lab: coupled feedback loops between pedagogy, food production, and building performance.

## Cross-references

Taleb (*Antifragile*) on why optimising for efficiency destroys redundancy. Tsing (*Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet*) on reinforcing loops of extraction outrunning regeneration. Fukuoka (*The One-Straw Revolution*) on reducing intervention to shift loop dominance.

### Threads

[Green School BiRD Lab](https://www.mainfrank.com/green-school-bird-lab/)

[Gili Meno: Zero](https://www.mainfrank.com/gili-meno-zero/)

### Buy

[Bookshop.org, supporting independent bookshops](https://bookshop.org/a/MAINFRANK/9781603580557?ref=mainfrank.com)