Top 1200 Systems Thinking Quotes & Sayings

There are systems called zero discharge emission systems that would prevent any pollution from making it into the water or the air.

No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems ... a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent.

All economies are structured differently - the tax systems, the regulatory systems, the federal systems - and that is as true of Australia and the United States as it is of Australia and Germany and the U.K.

There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: passive systems collect the sunlight that hits your home, and active systems collect the sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too.

The notion that better engineering can solve all our problems is rooted in an ignorance of non-linear systems and selective/wishful thinking.

We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time.

We closely track the systems Boeing builds for us, and they're some very capable systems. So that's been my focus. It is something that I look at every month. I look at the metrics for all major combat systems and our platforms, which Boeing builds many, and they're successful platforms.

A major attack on our cyber systems could shut down our critical infrastructure - financial systems, communications systems, electric grids, power plants, water treatment centers, transportation systems and refineries - that allows us to run our economy and protect the safety of Americans.

Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.

A terrific, stimulating book...Ramalingam clearly and engagingly shows how the use of complex adaptive systems thinking can significantly strengthen and enhance the impacts and effectiveness of global foreign aid.

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.

There is a race between the increasing complexity of the systems we build and our ability to develop intellectual tools for understanding their complexity. If the race is won by our tools, then systems will eventually become easier to use and more reliable. If not, they will continue to become harder to use and less reliable for all but a relatively small set of common tasks. Given how hard thinking is, if those intellectual tools are to succeed, they will have to substitute calculation for thought.

I believe that if you are talking about economic stress, the systems of the world are very fragile, and if we put our hope and trust in the systems that men have created, they will guarantee failure.

I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.

We are not pursuing research to develop ABM space systems. There are studies to improve systems of warning against a missile attack, communications and navigation systems and to develop ground-based ABM defences.

There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

We contacted the FBI months ago, when the DNC issue came about. They've reviewed all of our systems. We have hacking detection systems in place.

The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.

Our civilization is facing a radical, imminent mass change. The alternative to the hierarchical power structure is based on mutual aid and group consensus. As hackers we can learn these systems, manipulate these systems, and shut down these systems if we need to.

My background is putting in large systems that change lives... The right kind of systems can bring honesty and efficiency.

I had been here five years already, training very hard, learning about the systems, the shuttle, the station systems. But, everything really became real when I started to work with them.

Since the election [of Donald Trump], I've been thinking about a lot of theory. Lots of [Michel] Foucault and [Karl] Marx, thinking about different systems, thinking about power. Trying to figure out what I can take and learn from history as a tool for getting through whatever is happening right now, which feels very significant and major.

In systems thinking, increases in understanding are believed to be obtainable by expanding the systems to be understood, not by reducing them to their elements. Understanding proceeds from the whole to its parts, not from the parts to the whole as knowledge does.

The driver of the power of intelligent systems is the knowledge the systems have about their universe of discourse, not the sophistication of the reasoning process the systems employ.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement

We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

Legal reform has significant dangers: changing only the window-dressing of harmful systems but leaving the violence of the systems in tact, failing to provide actual relief for those facing the worst conditions, and legitimizing or expanding systems of harm.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount. Because before that I wasn't thinking about systems or food insecurity or whatever. I was just thinking about not getting picked on for being black and not being hungry.

Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.

People crave predictability, and when you design and use systems, you give people predictability. More importantly, when you build systems, they can help you orchestrate, and orchestration helps you create the habits that continuously improve the systems!

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don't work.

Physicists analyse systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

When you look at how American national freight systems are connected, it's a bit of a patchwork. When you look at how even road systems and rail systems work across state lines, it's a bit of a patchwork.

Russia is modernizing its nuclear systems. They're moving toward more effective tactical nuclear systems. They're moving toward delivery systems designed to evade anti-ballistic missile defenses. The Russians are investing, by the way, in robotic weapons, including a potential robotic tank. Their investment in new technology, I suspect, outweighs all of the European defense research and development spending combined.

What worries me is that we are increasingly enmeshed in incompetent systems, that is, systems that exhibit pathological behaviour but cant fix themselves.

Gravitational systems are the ashes of prior electrical systems.

We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.

When the United States cannibalize dollars from the defensive business of the NSA, securing our communications, protecting our systems, patching zero-day vulnerabilities, and instead we're giving those dollars to be used for creating new vulnerabilities in our systems so that they can surveil us and other people abroad who use the same systems.

Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.

Our culture has valued closed systems and tries to generate them in all walks of life. Women are better at and more comfortable with open systems, which occur naturally in nature.

A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness...

Around the world there are certain marital systems, certain physical systems, political systems, social systems, and all those things are kind of turned on their head but represented in various ways within "The Lobster."

My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems.

Our ancient yogis and sages were not just medical healers, but systems scientists and systems engineers, who saw the body and the universe as an interconnected engineering system, a system of systems that are governed by fundamental engineering systems principles.

Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.

Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive.... But let’s take that one step forward... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present.

Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but the systems remain constant.

I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems.

I believe that if you don't have systems, you don't have a business - you simply have a job for yourself. My challenge has been to build those systems in a new restaurant setting.

One of the interesting applications of symbolic systems is artificial intelligence, and I spent some time thinking about how to create a brain that operates the way ours does.

To be anti-racist you have to be actively a part of dismantling the systems that surround you and the systems that you benefit from.

God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed.

With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.

The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems.

I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since 2005. I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems.

If you're not working to get your business or investing operation to operate without you, you're thinking too small. Think team and systems.

Any incident could instantly blow up. Both sides [USA and Russia] are modernizing and increasing their military systems, including nuclear systems.