Systems Thinking Quotes

“With complex, systemic challenges such as climate, there are no individual winners. Collectively addressing carbon impact means we all win, or we all lose.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“In a systemic world, there is no such thing as a discrete or isolated event - impacts cascade and spill over.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The world is shifting from one of credentials to one of capabilities.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

“Disruption is no longer merely a single or recurring event, but a steady state, expanding its impact. In short, while disruption has always existed, it is now disrupting itself.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“The companies, institutions, and governments relied on assumptions about the predictability of the world, and they were wrong. As their assumptions had worked in the past, they are now blaming the nature of the world (not the erroneous assumptions they made).”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“In a systemic world, there is no such thing as discrete or isolated events - impacts cascade and spill over. Drivers of disruption collide, intersect, and amplify.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“You can’t rely on modeling uncertainties to deliver certainty.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Systemic disruption requires us to accept that there may be no measurable data to fully substantiate our understanding of those disruptions. Imaging and exploring the multiplicity of potential futures which may arise from disruptions is a creative exercise, not a number-crunching one.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“The single most dangerous mistake is looking at disruption as isolated, special cases or independent single episodic events.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“If we are to remain relevant, we must create innovative social and economic ecosystems that become stronger under stress and through shocks.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“Maintaining sustainability (in its broadest sense) may be contingent on humanity’s ability to manage and problem-solve ourselves out of the most complex, systemic, and existential risks.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Climate-aligned interventions at the levels of education & mindsets, foresight & visions, and structures offer the most leverage for systemic change.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Pre-defined boxes and categorical, rigid sub-segments do not reflect our complex systemic world, where everything is interrelated and interconnected.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Certainty is fleeting, but through experimentation, systems innovation and trial-and-error, instructive patterns emerge as guidance.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The true impact of innovation isn’t in its disruptiveness; rather, it lies in its ability to ignite hope, unlock new possibilities and catalyse positive transformations across systems.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The world is not made up of isolated controllable parts. And so the strings, wires and controls used to manage this illusionary world are obsolete.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“AI won’t replace humans, but people who can use it will.” This sounds reassuring, but it oversimplifies the complex future of work and AI integration. Experts predict a surge in opportunities, but the intricate interplay between cognification, mass automation, and how we work remains uncharted. The net effect of AI on employment is unknown - we have no data on the future.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Permaculture economics promotes adaptive, responsive systems, like nature's evolution.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

“Our Disruptive Thinking Canvas provides a streamlined six-step process, consolidating the foundational principles of our work in one location.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“It is important to address the (mis)perception that systems research is non-humanistic. To offer a short response, it is vital to remember that our civilization — a society where people live in towns or cities, communicate by writing, and build monumental structures , is a system connected by our relationships. The subject of systems cannot be more human.”
― Marvin Cheung, 5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

“Everything in our world is constantly evolving - except our organizations, strategies, and governance structures”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Systems thinking helps us to understand the relationship between the structure and the behaviour.”
― Ines Garcia, Sustainable Happy Profit

“Mapping this architecture out as an image, as we covered, is a great way to shed new light on the connections, and better understand how your own systems operate.”
― Ines Garcia, Sustainable Happy Profit

“To be able to co-create in your organisation, you need to connect information and relationships, both to be driven by transparency and fairness, focus on learning and what is achieved—rather than just what it’s been done.”
― Ines Garcia, Sustainable Happy Profit

“Being a sustainable, happy and profitable organisation goes beyond checklists and execution of responsibility. It’s a deep partnership of the whole, across your value chain, employees, customers and community.”
― Ines Garcia, Sustainable Happy Profit

“A systems approach asks questions like: Why are we stuck here? Why are we presented with this narrow list of unsatisfactory options in the first place?”
― Marvin Cheung, 5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

“A system-wide transformation can be achieved only when everyone takes a step forward together, like a puzzle that will be solved only when we turn all the keys at the same time.”
― Marvin Cheung, 5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

“The rapidly changing global landscape invalidates even recent decisions – it is unproductive to force a rigid model on a fluid reality.”
― Marvin Cheung, 5 Ideas from Global Diplomacy: System-wide Transformation Methods to Close the Compliance Gap and Advance the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

“Purposes are deducted from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer

“Everything we think and know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. None of these is or ever will be the real world.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Thinking In Systems: A Primer