Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Page 7
The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
✏️ Need to know how they interact, the gaps and fillers, the elements, and the purpose/function. 📖 (Page 7)
Page 12
You think that because you understand “one” that you must therefore understand “two” because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand “and.” -Sufi teaching story
📖 (Page 12)
Page 14
Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.
✏️ Vision and mission are meaningless without the actions to back them up 📖 (Page 14)
Page 22
The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks than flows… We tend to focus on inflows more than outflows. Therefore, we sometimes miss that we can fill a bathtub not only by increasing the inflow rate, but also by decreasing the outflow rate. Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oilbased economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field-although different people profit from it.
📖 (Page 22)
Page 23
A stock takes time to change, because flows take time to flow.
✏️ They are delayed, shock absorbers, buffers 📖 (Page 23)
Page 24
Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be independent and temporarily out of balance with each other.
✏️ Stock allows for inventory storage, etc and its level can be regulated as needed thru feedback loops. 📖 (Page 24)
Page 71
Nonrenewable resources are stock-limited. The entire stock is available at once, and can be extracted at any rate (limited mainly by extraction capital). But since the stock is not renewed, the faster the extraction rate, the shorter the lifetime of the resource. Renewable resources are flow-limited. They can support extraction or harvest indefinitely, but only at a finite flow rate equal to their regeneration rate. If they are extracted faster than they regenerate, they may eventually be driven below a critical threshold and become, for all practical purposes, nonrenewable
📖 (Page 71)