Something called a “feedback loop” is boosting our economy.

You can read about it yourself in Adam Lahart’s Wall Street Journal article (see How a Feedback loop is Providing a Boost, Dec. 23, 2010).  Although Lahart never mentions the word “feedback loop” in the article itself (I assume you have to know what one is), he refers to this hopeful trend:

Consumer’s willingness to spend (and not save) is encouraging businesses to spend, which means businesses are hiring, which is sending a signal to consumers….

You guessed it.   It’s okay to spend!

If Mr. Lahart were to have included a simple diagram in his article (and I wish he did), it might look something like this:

(The R in the middle lets you know this is a reinforcing feedback loop).

Here’s an even shorter version of this loop:

Consumer optimism generates business optimism, which generates consumer optimism and so on.

As a systems educator, I’m thrilled to see a “feedback loop” in the headline of a Wall Street Journal article.  We sorely need more media coverage that moves beyond bullet points and mechanistic metaphors, to language and images that more closely match the interdependent, dynamic, complex reality of our world.  I’m game for anything that helps people to develop systems literacy, that is, to “connect the dots” and see not just of the parts but the interrelationships, patterns, and dynamics as well of complex issues.

Mr. Lahart’s article was a tease to me.   I really wanted him to use phrase “feedback loop” in his article and to show us, using some kind of image, how the loop worked.  Perhaps he assumes that the average WSJ readers knows what a feedback loop is (loops of cause and effect) and that the loops come in two flavors: balancing feedback, which counteracts or lessens change, and reinforcing feedback, which amplifies or reinforces change.  (In this article, he’s referring to the latter).*

At this point, you might be wondering:  Why should I care about feedback loops?

Here’s why I care about them:   Feedback loops help us to understand why things change and why they stay the same.

Mr. Lahart refers to a “vicious cycle… starting to turn virtuous” (feedback loops) to explain why and how consumer optimism is changing (in this case, increasing). Everyday challenges, from an escalating marital argument to resistance of a new school policy, all can be traced to the interaction of balancing (or self-correcting) and reinforcing feedback loops.

Here’s the good news:  When you see and understand these loops, you then have a better chance of influencing them.

Okay, you still might be saying, I get it, but so what?

As a researcher, I’ve investigated children’s and adult’s intuitive understandings of complex systems and have found that deep misconceptions about complex systems persist, even among highly educated adults.   In one study (see “Thinking about Systems”), a significant number of students and adults used “open-loop” or one-way causal thinking when “closed-loop” causality or feedback was present.

This would explain why a significant number of Americans use their thermostats like a gas pedal.  It’s too cold?  Turn up the thermostat.  Too hot?  Turn it down.  The temperature is increased or decreased suit our moment-by-moment needs.

When we understand balancing feedback, we set the thermostat and leave it alone, letting the internal feedback structure do its work and  allowing the temperature to self-adjust to a desired temperature.

When we pay attention to balancing feedback, we’re less likely to over-correct and over-steer, perhaps allowing our children or our team to handle a problem themselves.

When we understand reinforcing feedback, we see that seemingly small changes can “grow” into big consequences.

We share scientists concerns about melting ice in polar regions.

Cover of the Independent Newspaper, 1.29.07

We “get” that a vicious cycle is at work when a slight rise in atmospheric temperature begins to melt ice in the polar regions; the now bare ground absorbs more heat, causing even more ice to melt.

When we pay attention to reinforcing feedback, we also understand a successful person’s willingness to take on more work.  “Success to the successful” sounds good, but when success brings more and more work, if a balancing loop isn’t brought into play, this reinforcing loop often results in a case of diminishing returns, also know as  burn-out.

Mr. Lahart, thank you for using “feedback” in the title of your article.  Next time, I encourage you to use throw in a feedback loop and maybe even use “feedback loop” in a sentence.   We could all use the practice.

————————–

* Reinforcing feedback loops act as engines of growth. When reinforcing feedback is present, change in a system feeds back to cause even more change in the system.   Think of the spread of a rumor, or a virus, or your saving account (if you actually save and don’t spend).

Balancing or self-regulating feedback return a system (like your body, an ecosystem, market systems) back to a state of equilibrium.  By their very nature, balancing feedback works to bring things to a desired state and keep them there.

I’ll be writing more in this blog about ways to teach people of all ages about feedback loops.  For other great resources, see the Waters Foundation site or check out the cover article by Steve Wilhite — “Concept Learning — Feedback Loops” in the Fall 2010 Creative Learning Exchange newsletter. (This particular article focuses on high school students).

Photograph:  John Gustafsson/AP

Like thousands of people around the world, my April travel plans were no match for Eyjafjallajökullo, a smallish volcano located in the far south of Iceland.  I’m in Iceland now for a Balaton Group meeting and thanks to an enthusiastic soil scientist, I find myself  standing in a pasture not far from  Eyjafjallajökull. With its sleek, gray sides and surprisingly flat top, Eyjafjallajökull is far from the ugly, menacing volcano I expected.

I’m struck by the vibrancy of this place:  a  herd of Icelandic horses grazes about 200 feet down the riverbed and what must be hundreds of sheep roam over the hillsides down the road.  Thick vegetation covers the pasture and Icelandic birch trees line the roads. Even the soil I stand on has a bounce to it.

If you remember, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökullo created a massive ash cloud that eventually forced most of Europe’s airspace to close for five consecutive days, canceling almost all flights to and from Europe.   My family and I were not at all pleased by this turn of events.  When we had to explain why we weren’t in Scotland (where I was supposed to attend an IFF World Game), I had to explain, “We were ashed!”

If you had asked me “What good is a volcano?” I would have said, “not much!”               So, when I learned this week that volcanoes have a silver lining (or two), I had to laugh.  Even a volcano, the same one that ruined my travel plans, has a role to play in the tightly interconnected and delicately balanced phenomenon we call earth.

So, what good is a volcanco?

Thanks to Guõrún Gísladóttir, an enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable professor of Geography at the University of Iceland,  I learned one answer to this question has to do with soils.

In Iceland, the soils are called andosols.  Andosols are soils that are formed in the volcanic regions of the world. These soils have special properties that make them an important and unique natural resource.

Diagram created by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) agency

These soils form from tephra, the stuff blown out of volcanoes.

Professor Gísladóttir and I grab a few shovels and dig down four feet or so in the pasture near Eyjafjallajökullo.  We find six different colored stripes in the soil, each stripe telling a different story.

The author digging for tephra

As I learn, tephra is filled with nutrients.  If you taste it (which I did!), it has a crunchy, earthy taste, not far from a hyper-healthy granola.  With the help of the rains, the nutrients from the tephra wash into the underlying vegetation and into the soil itself.

Whether your soils are fed by a volcano, or by salmon in a nearby river, or good old household compost,  healthy soil provides a foundation for healthy crops, the cleanliness of  water,  and the livelihoods of  farmers.  If handled well, soils (and the millions of creatures living in our soils) also help to break down waste, turning it into food for other species.

We depend on soil to live, yet it is surprisingly easy to forget.  When we pave where pavement isn’t necessary, clear cut forests, over-graze land, or cultivate land without protecting the top soil, we leave our soil unprotected and vulnerable to erosion.

Dana Meadows, an American systems scientist, worked with great mastery and diligence to raise the level of public discussion about a variety of systemic issues, one of them being soil erosion.  Explaining how nonlinear relationships influence soil erosion, she wrote:

“The effect of nonlinear relationships is also not generally understood. The public debate on the seriousness of soil erosion, for example, has yet to recognize that the relationship between soil depth and crop yield can be sharply nonlinear – that a little erosion may not have much effect, but a little more erosion may reduce agricultural output dramatically.”

Of course, there is much, much more for me to learn about soils.  So for now, I have decided to become a student of soil, studying how to create and talk about healthy soil and prevent soil erosion.

What’s my motivation?    I share Dana’s desire to raise the level of public discussion about systemic issues.  I also want to be able to explain to my kids how the health of our soil effects the health of people.  I want them to be inspired by soil, to invest in it and to treasure it.  If they have all the money in the world, but poor soil, dirty water and less wholesome food and less natural beauty, what good is that?

Perhaps after we all learn more about soil, my kids won’t think their mother is crazy when she “puts the garden to bed” in the fall.  Maybe, just maybe, they might pause as they step out off the school bus or onto a field, and notice the feel of the soil beneath their feet, and even revel in it, just as Walt Whitman once did:

Underfoot the divine soil

Overhead the sun.

The press of my foot to the earth

Springs a hundred affections.

— Walt Whitman

An article in this week’s New York Times is a causing quite a brouhaha among fans of systems thinking. It seems that the Army is fed up with Powerpoint. (We Have Met the Enemy and He is Powerpoint, April 26, 2010)

Hallelujah! 

But wait. Why are we celebrating?

Like many of us in the applied systems theory field, the Army (and in particular, General McMaster) has recognized that, “some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” So the complexity of the Afghan situation cannot be condensed into bullet points, after all. PowerPoint, a favorite tool of the military to convey vast amounts of information, is under fire because, as General McMaster points out, it takes no account of interconnections and interrelationships among political, economic and ethnic forces.

General McMaster, we the scientists, practitioners and educators in the burgeoning field of applied systems science applaud you with one hand.  We agree with you that problem solving requires a focus on interconnections, rather than on parts in isolation. Indeed, if you look around you’ll see a systems approach is driving the search for solutions for many of the problems we face in the environment, engineering, and in human societies. More and more, we see food, climate, childhood obesity, poverty, energy and other global challenges “systems” issues.

Yet when the interconnections and interrelationships of American military strategy were represented (as they were in this PowerPoint slide shown in Kabul), General McChrystal brushed it off as too complex and therefore not understandable.

What’s a leader to do?  Most leaders are required to drive action. They must clearly state a goal, line up a set of actions, exert pressure, and then reach the goal.  Many leaders would agree that when lining up strategy, bullet points over-simplify and in the end, mislead. Yet complex systems maps are, well, too complex. 

Let’s pause here for a moment to ask the elephant-in-the-room question:  How did we get here? How did we get so bullet point and PowerPoint obsessed?

Of course, that could be the topic of a much longer blog (or book) but here is one, short answer:  We Americans are encouraged to focus on objects rather than relationships.

In his book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why (2003), cognitive psychologist Richard Nisbett reports on studies conducted by developmental psychologists with American children. American school children and college students tended to group objects (such as a cow, a chicken and grass) by their taxonomic category. Chinese school children and college students, however, grouped objects based on interrelationships. For example, American students would group a cow with a chicken because they were both animals whereas Chinese students would be more likely to put the cow and grass together because the “cow eats the grass”.  Referring to a similar study conducted with American and Japanese children, Nisbett observes:  “American children are learning that the world is mostly a place with objects, Japanese children that the world is mostly about relationships.”

There are many other influences, such as language structure, compartmentalization of disciplines in school, and more.  It’s no wonder our military leaders get antsy when they see a complex systems map.  Most Americans, including our military, industry and government leaders, were not taught to think systemically; we were taught that the best way to understand a subject was to analyze it or break it up into parts.  

Thinking in terms of systems doesn’t have to be hard.  And it doesn’t have to replace bullet pointed lists and the 2×2 matrix.  In many instances, it simply requires a perception shift from, for example, focusing on parts and fragments to tracing interconnections and the often surprising  dynamics created by closed loops of cause and effect.* 

In my classes and talks, I encourage students and audiences to be suspect of information that is presented as discrete (bullet point lists, for instance).  When you see the world in terms of interconnections, networks and systems, you make a perspective shift:

From:  Discrete information   –>    To:  Closed Loops of Cause & Effect

When presented with bullet points, ask questions.  Probe how those elements may be interconnected in closed loops of causality.  Imagine you are in the audience as a presenter concludes his or her presentation with a list of “Next Steps.”  One step is to “train future leaders” in a specific research or problem-solving approach. The next step is to “increase funding for special projects”.  Rather that nodding your head and swallowing the list whole, pause, and ask:  “What will happen if we train more future leaders?  Will that have some impact on the our ability to ‘increase funding for special projects’?” Look beyond the bullet points for multiple causes, effects and unintended or unexpected impacts.

“What?!” you say?  Ask more questions?  There’s no reward in that!  As a general, manager, or any type of leader, I need to know where to exert my effort, my resources and my attention.  

I can offer you this promise:  If  you find ways to work with your team to map either the current or desired reality of a complex issue, using pencil & paper sketches, PowerPoint or computer models, you will:  a) uncover a host of unintended consequences that emerge from the interactions among your decisions, b) discover unforeseen leverage points, and c) make more informed decisions and policy changes that will likely lead to positive results. As a side benefit, you will be more likely to get off that problem solving treadmill, where our “solutions” often only create more problems or make the original problem worse and, as a result of creating causal models as a group, you will experience greater clarity and learning among group members. (By the way, if you don’t do these things, Joseph Campbell has a warning for you:  “People who don’t have a concept of the whole, can do very unfortunate things…”). 

And what about PowerPoint?  Is it such an evil tool? 

In my opinion, the Army missed the point about PowerPoint.  PowerPoint, like any tool, it is only as good as the person using it. You can dumb down complexity by parsing out information into mind-numbing sets of bullet points.  You can also use PowerPoint to represent complex interrelationships and dynamics by using arrows, icons and builds.  The mistake made with the American military map is that too large a serving of spaghetti was put on one plate, instead of showing one noodle (or causal link), and one domain (e.g., tribal governance) at a time. (My assumption here though, is that since the map was created by the highly-skilled PA Consulting Group, the map was presented to the generals one section at a time). 

Whether you’re an educator, business leader, physician, urban planner, engineer, community organizer, or military general, it’s time to be curious about how this is connected to that.  We all need to move beyond laundry list or bullet point thinking to seeing and thinking about patterns of interaction, networks and other lines of inquiry and problem solving that more closely matches the more interdependent, complex world we live in. 

L. Booth Sweeney,  Concord, MA

For another system dynamics perspective from on the New York Times article, see this post from Chris Soderquist. 

Many thanks to Gale Pryor and John Sweeney for their thoughtful commentary on early drafts of this post).  

*What are “closed loops of cause and effect?”:  When we “get” the idea of closed loops (vs. straight lines) of cause and effect, we understand that closed “feedback loops”— circular loops of mutual causality that amplify change — underlie the spread of a rumor, the growth of a virus, or a successful person’s willingness to take on more work.  Reinforcing feedback loops act as engines of growth:  change in a system feeds back to cause even more change in the system. 

We also look for balancing or self-regulating feedback — a set of interactions that return a system (like your body, an ecosystem, market systems) back to a state of equilibrium.  By their very nature, balancing feedback works to bring things to a desired state and keep them there.  When we understand balancing feedback, we stop using our thermostat like a gas pedal, increasing or decreasing the temperature to suit our moment-by-moment needs.  Rather we let the internal feedback structure do its work, allowing the temperature to self-adjust to a desired temperature.