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

“Withstanding systemic disruption requires effectiveness over efficiency.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Systemic disruption will continue to drive significant shifts in business models, value creation, and value destruction.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Existential risks all have the ability to defy sustainability. There is no sustainability without mitigating existential risks.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“The only way to reinvent a business model for today’s complex world is to approach it like a system.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation

“Society is on the road to the paradox of polarization and uniformity.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume III - Beta Your Life: Existence in a Disruptive World

“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

“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 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

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

“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

“As it grows, every system exhibits self-reinforcing behavior.”
― David Amerland, Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,' Havel wrote. 'In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.' The smallest choices you and I make, every single day, can change the world for better or worse. The simple act of refusing to live a lie has the power to transform who we are and what we are capable of, both as individuals and as a society. In other words, trying our best to live a congruent life is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and each other.”
― Todd Rose, Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions

“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

“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