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Systems Quotes

Browse 153 quotes about Systems.

Systems Quotes

“A ‘system’ is always something finite, limited, transitory, a too narrow framework for the infinite dialectical movement of the world, and even in the case of the great philosophies it was always their ‘system’ which most quickly became out of date; what remained of them was always the dialectical content which was often hidden in their work in spite of the ‘system’.”

PhilosophySystemsHegelianism
Book:Dialectical Materialism and Communism
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“Now, communicating is a system. A single message might move across six different formats before it sticks. One piece of content might be in written form. Another might happen in a panel discussion. That discussion might be cut into short-form videos and posted on a variety of channels. At my company, we have found that communication works best when you think through it as a system of sticky moments that are designed with intention.”

CommunicationContentSystemsIntentionalityMessagingCommunicating
Author:Nancy Duarte
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“[...] Queste difficoltà possono essere risolte nel modo migliore facendo buon viso a cattivo gioco. I ritardi possono essere tollerati accettandoli ed elaborando una scansione temporale che li preveda. Si può poi tollerare una certa imprecisione nella risposta pensando in termini di . Così invece di dire: >, noi diremo: . Le varie classi devono essere del tutto distinte e ben lontane dal sovrapporsi, cioé - topologicamente parlando - potremmo dire che devono avere tra loro una distanza finita. Con una decisione del genere avremo introdotto una ben definita divisione del lavoro tra il matematico e l'ingegnere, che permetterà a ognuno dei due di andare avanti senza preoccuparsi se le sue assunzioni siano in accordo con quelle dell'altro.”

ScienceMathematicsSystemsElectronicsScienzaMechanicalLogicaMatematica
Book:Mechanical Intelligence: Collected Works of A.M. Turing
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“A systems approach asks questions like: Why are we stuck here? Why are we presented with this narrow list of unsatisfactory options in the first place?”

Systems ThinkingSystems
Book:5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
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“A system-wide transformation can be achieved only when everyone takes a step forward together, like a puzzle that will be solved only when we turn all the keys at the same time.”

Systems ThinkingSystemsSystems Change
Book:5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
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“The rapidly changing global landscape invalidates even recent decisions – it is unproductive to force a rigid model on a fluid reality.”

Systems ThinkingImplementationSystems
Book:5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals
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“When we look at supply chains and distribution in nature, we see that natural systems include an abundance of nodes in a network. Distribution is widely spread - enough to include the maximum nodes feasible yet not enough to add unnecessary time or cost to the path a thing takes from source to destination. This maximizes efficiency, and minimizes the risk of congestion and bottle-necks.”

DistributionPermaculture EconomySystemsSupply ChainPermaculture BusinessBusiness Systems
Author:Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr
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“I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")”

WorldTalkingBlindGenderOppressionWomanQuestionExperiencesHuman BeingSystemsSilencingBlack Men
Book:We Should All Be Feminists
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“To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring.”

ScienceKnowledgeSolutionsGoalsDeceptionEnigmaSystemsMirages
Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Americans have clung to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re worth in the market, without examining changes in the legal and political institutions that define the market. This tautology is easily confused with a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim is meaningful only if the system’s legal and political institutions are morally just. It has lured us into thinking nothing can or should be done to alter what people are paid because the market has decreed it. By this logic, the oligarchy is natural and inevitable.”

PhilosophyPoliticsEconomicsSystemsWage Labor
Book:The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
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“The hospital was a microcosm of these larger failures, with comprised physical infrastructure, compromised operating systems, and compromised individuals. And also instances of heroism. The scenario was familiar to students of mass disasters around the world. Systems always failed. The official response was always unconscionably slow. Coordination and communication were particularly bad. These were truths Americans had come to accept about other people's disasters. It was shocking to see the scenario play out at home.”

HumanitarianDisasterInfrastructureHospitalSystemsDisastersDisaster PreparednessHumanitarian Activities
Author:Sheri Fink
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“To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?”

LifeWorkCitiesLivingCity LifeSystemsCommutingRhythms
Book:Severance
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“The kind of static and segmental thinking which regards problems and issues as separate and apart unto themselves logically trips itself into the pitfall of a second fundamental fallacy. It is inevitable that this type of mental isolation, which fails to observe the relationships between problems, would and does lack a pragmatic understanding of the functional relationship between a local community and the larger social scene. It reveals a complete lack of recognition of the obvious fact that the life of each neighborhood is to a major extent shaped by forces which far transcend the local scene. It requires nothing more than plain common sense to realize that many of the problems in a local community which seemingly have their roots in the neighborhood in reality stem from sources far removed from the community. To a considerable extent these problems are the result of vast destructive forces which pervade the entire social scene. It is when these forces impinge upon the local community that they give rise to a definite community problem. It should, thus, always be remembered that many apparently local problems are in reality malignant microcosms of vast conflicts, pressures, stresses and strains of the entire social order.”

RelationshipsCause And EffectSocial OrderSystemsCommunities
Book:Reveille for Radicals
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“After working with thousands of leaders and teams in every kind of industry, and in schools and government agencies worldwide, this is what we have learned: once you've decided what to do, your biggest challenge is in getting people to execute it at the level of excellence you need... It's natural for a leader to assume the people are the problem. After all, they are the ones not doing what we need to have done. But you would be wrong. The people are not the problem... The problem is inherent in the system.”

LeadershipExecutionSystemsProcesses
Author:Chris McChesney, Sean Covey & Jim Huling
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“Systemkritik ist oft ein ­elegantes Alibi, um die Verantwortung des einzelnen Individuums kleinzureden. Criticism of the system is often an elegant alibi, to downgrade the responsibility of the individual.”

SystemsIndividual ResponsibilitySustainable LivingEcological Awareness
Book:All you need is less: eine Kultur des Genug aus ökonomischer und buddhistischer Sicht
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“The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply. What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency. In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that “Captains of industry are born, not made”; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate. In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.”

SocietyDevelopmentManagementExcellenceCooperationSystemsMeritocracyRecruitingCompetency
Book:The Principles of Scientific Management
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“Overall, then, we will view cas [complex adaptive systems] as systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In cas, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agent's efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents. This one feature is a major source of the complex temporal patterns that cas generate. To understand cas we must understand these ever-changing patterns.”

AgentsComplexityAdaptationEcosystemsSystemsComplex Adaptive Systems
Book:Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity
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“Tags [distinctive agent features observable by other agents] almost always define the network by delimiting the critical interactions, the major connections. Tags acquire this role because the adaptive processes that modify cas [complex adaptive systems] select for tags that mediate useful interactions and against tags that cause malfunctions. That is, agents with useful tags spread, while agents with malfunctioning tags cease to exist.”

CommunicationEvolutionSystemsSocial BehaviorNetworksComplex Adaptive SystemsTags
Book:Hidden order: how adaptation builds complexity
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“Disclosures that quantify climate risks can help realign decision-making towards building a resilient climate economy. This creates positive feedback loops to drive further adaptive measures.”

ClimateResilienceSustainabilitySystemsEsgFeedback Loops
Book:The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation
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“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free”

ScienceEmergenceSystemsCybernetics
Book:At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
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“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”

ScienceEmergenceSystemsCybernetics
Author:Stuart Kauffman
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