The search for simple - if not simpleminded - solutions to complex problems is a consequence of the inability to deal effectively with complexity.

Russel L. Ackoff

The critical point for contemporary management, it is the following, when you improve each part of the system taken separately, you do not improve the performance of the system taken as a whole and are very likely to hurt it or decrease it and that is completely counterintuitive.

Russell Ackoff

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.

Michael Gerber

In order for any business to succeed, it must first become a system so that the business functions exactly the same way every time down to the last detail.

Rick Harshaw

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferburg

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple - that's creativity.

Charles Mingus

Waar patronen worden doorbroken ontstaat een nieuwe wereld.

Tuli Kupferberg

Small differences in your [system] performance can lead to large differences in your results.

Brian Tracy

Als je het systeem niet ziet ben je eraan overgeleverd.

Barry Oshry

When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.

Alexander den Heijer

More than 95% of your organization's problems derive from your systems, processes and methods, not from your individual workers. Improving system takes a concerted, well-planned, usually cross-functional effort led from the top of the organization. Without conscious attention to systems, you will focus on people. Your people are doing their best, but  their best efforts cannot compensate for your inadequate and dysfunctional system.

- Peter Scholtes

Als je iets echt wilt begrijpen, probeer het dan te veranderen.

Kurt Lewin

A system of local optima is not an optimal system at all; it is a very suboptimal system.

Eliyahu Goldratt

Approach lean holistically, a system of interdependent parts and people must work together to achieve true lasting success.

M. Micklewright

People are already doing their best; the problems are not the people but are with the system. It is management's responsibility to change the system.

W. Edwards Deming

Manage the system, not the people.

Jurgen Appelo

So often the problem is in the system, not in the people. If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results.

Stephen Covey

A bad system can destroy good people.

Gary Mottershead

Een keer is toeval, twee keer is opmerkelijk en drie keer is een patroon.

Anoniem

Managers should manage the system, not the people.

Jurgen Appelo

The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.

W. Edwards Deming

From a very early age, we are taught to break apaaaaart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes the complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sens of connection to the larger whole.

Peter Senge

Als 't probleem 't probleem niet is, is de oplossing niet de oplossing.

Jan Jutten

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

A problem never exists in isolation; it is surrounded by other problems in space and time.

Russell L. Ackoff

None of the problems of our time can be understood in isolation. All of them are systemic and in need of systemic solutions.

Fritjof Capra

A system is not the sum of the behavior of its parts, it’s the product of their interactions.

Russell Ackoff

95% of the performance of an organisation is attributable to the system (processes, technology, work design, regulations,etc) and 5% are attributable to the individual.

W. Edwards Deming

The systems approach to problems focuses on systems taken as a whole, not on their parts taken separately.

Russell Ackoff

System thinking is a way of understanding the world that emphasises the relationship among a systems parts rather than the parts taken seperately.

David Kerr

It’s a waste of time to try to make a dysfunctional design work by improving its parts.

Daniel Quinn

94% of problems in business are systems driven and only 6% are people driven.

W. Edwards Deming

Happy is he who can trace effects to their causes.

Vergilius

Thanks to variability, small variations make [complex systems] adapt and change continuously by learning from the environment and being, sort of, continuously under pressure to be fit.

Nassim Taleb

The systems perspective tells us that we must look beyond individual mistakes or bad luck to understand important problems.

Peter Senge

A Systems Thinker is a person who has learned to reverse our natural tendency to fragment the world around us in order to gain understanding, by looking for wholes and the interrelationships that make those wholes a system.

Barry Richmond

When placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results.

Peter Senge

Managers are not confronted with separate problems but with situations that consist of complex systems of strongly interacting problems. I call such situations messes.

Russell Ackoff

Organizational models tend to focus only on snapshots of a complex, evolutionary process

Claudio Ciborra

Understanding of a system cannot be obtained by analysis. Analysis...reveals its structure and how it works. Its product is know-how, knowledge, not understanding.

Russell Ackoff

The essence of the discipline of system thinking lies in a shift of mind: seeing interrelationships rather than linear cause-effect chains, and seeing processes of change rather than snapshots.

Peter Senge

In analysis, something to be understood is first taken apart...Synthesis is exactly the opposite. The thing to be understood is taken as part of a larger whole.

Russell Ackoff

The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.

Donella H. Meadows

Organizational models tend to focus only on snapshots of a complex, evolutionary process

Claudio Ciborra

An important aspect of a part’s performance is how it interacts with other parts to affect the performance of the whole.

Russell Ackoff

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

Peter Senge

Because a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts, its performance is never equal to the sum of the actions of its parts taken separately; it is a function of their interactions.

Russell Ackoff

3% of the problems have figures, 97% of the problems do not.

W. Edwards Deming

The arrogance that usually comes with organizational success is normally the root cause of eventual failure.

George Koenigsaecker