‘Thinking in systems’ has been identified as integral to the transition to the circular economy. As a concept, systems thinking is often positioned as a way of understanding the complex world around us.
What is systems thinking?
How can we apply systems thinking and what is its relevance to the circular economy? We’ve always had systems – a steam engine is a system, in that it’s a connection of interacting components with a purpose. The aim of the steam engine is to turn the wheels and, with that, pull the carriages. This is a narrow example of a mechanical and predictable system – where one pulls the levers, feeds the engine and gets the result. Train drivers will tell you there is an art to this, which gives us a hint about other systems that are not under our control. Coal burns in the steam engine’s fire, and the intensity varies. It depends on the quality of the coal, the amount put in, and the speed at which the train is travelling. These systems are much harder to manage, that is why we call it an art. For a long time, and ever since Newton described the universe as being like clockwork, we assumed the
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world was a bit like a machine. We have assumed that, in principle, we can understand, predict, control and literally engineer the result we want. This was very useful. It took us to the Moon. But, almost all real world systems are nothing like machine systems. We need to understand the context much better. The economy is often thought of as a machine to process resources. It is thought that the more efficient we make the machine, the better off everyone will be. Some people even think that X marks the spot: a supply and demand diagram tells us where the most efficient position will be. However, this is very simplistic. Not worrying about where resources come from, because the machine is efficient, is only looking at part of the picture. The big picture is that feedback from too much resource extraction and feedback from too much waste, do impact the economy in very damaging ways.
Photo: www.flickr.com/photos/nlireland/6199795865/National Library of Ireland on The Commons
In this interview, Ken Webster gets to grips with systems thinking.
