Implications of System Structure

One of the reasons that mental models are so complex is simply that the real-world systems that humans are trying to understand are highly complex. Over the years, system dynamicists have identified characteristics that seem to appear again and again in real-world systems -- particularly social systems. They have found that: (1) symptoms of a problem are often separated from the actual problem by time and space; (2) complex systems often behave counter to human intuition; (3) policy intervention in complex systems can frequently yield short-term successes but long-term failure, or the reverse; (4) internal system feedback often counters external policy intervention;(5) it is better to structure a system to withstand uncertain external shocks than to try to predict those external shocks; (6) real-world complex systems are not in equilibrium and are continually changing.

These characteristics arise due to the nonlinear stock, flow, feedback structures of social systems.