Learning Systems Thinking

Chapter 8. Designing Feedback Loops

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on.

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired

In Chapter 7, we practiced developing a proposition. We wove knowledge and experience, yours and other people’s, into strong recommendations and insights supported by valid reasons. We also strengthened those reasons. To reason collectively, people work together to strengthen the reasons that support their propositions.

This is important. Self-organizing and empowered teams reach sound and trustworthy conclusions without having to be told what to do. They can think, understand, and act in ways that don’t rely on persuasion, power, or politics. When there is complexity, they can proactively take a systems view and learn from other people’s experience and expertise.

Without the ability to self-organize, very little collective reasoning can happen. You need the friction that arises when your point of view bumps up against other points of view; that’s where you’ll discover conflicting mental models and positive opportunities for change. You need the support of collective practices that illuminate, rather than reinforce, your blind spots and biases.

To support collective reasoning, and therefore systems thinking, we design feedback loops.

The process of thinking together is a feedback ...