Agenda - 03-10-20; 8-a - Minutes

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3 1 • Mindset that anyone on both sides of these issues can use them or talking points or a 2 hammer—both sides can be right and both sides can be wrong 3 • Hard to explain to the public if you don't do these things—they are expected 4 5 Mr. Goodman reviewed the common characteristics of failed solutions as follows: 6 • Address symptoms vs. underlying problems 7 • Obvious and often succeed in the short run 8 • But short-term gains undermined by long-term impacts 9 • Negative consequences are unintentional 10 • If the problem recurs, we do not see our responsibility 11 12 Mr. Goodman framed remarks around the limitations of good intentions with the following 13 quote: 14 "When you are confronted by any complex social system ... with things about it that you're 15 dissatisfied with and anxious to fix,you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope 16 of helping. This is one of the sore discouragements of our time. If you want to fix something you 17 are first obliged to understand ... the whole system. " 18 Lewis Thomas 19 Physician,poet, etymologist, essayist, educator,policy advisor, researcher 20 Dean Yale Medical School &NYU 21 President Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute 22 23 Distinguishing Conventional From Systems Thinking 24 Mr. Goodman shared definitions of a system and systems thinking: 25 "A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that 26 achieves something"—Donella Meadows 27 "Systems Thinking is the ability to understand these interconnections in such a way as to 28 achieve a desired purpose." 29 30 Observations about Systems 31 Mr. Goodman shared laws of human systems: 32 • Many of today's problems were yesterday's solutions. 33 0 The Law of Unintended Consequences - Systems are seductive... what looks obvious to 34 do often generates non-obvious consequences... but NOT right away. 35 • The Law of Worse Before Better- What works in the short term typically makes things 36 worse in the long term and what works in the long term often makes things worse in the 37 short term. 38 • The Law of Compensating Feedback—The harder you push on the system the harder the 39 system pushes back. 40 • We are prisoners of systemic forces to the extent we are unaware of their existence and 41 don't appreciate their power. 42 • Systems naturally resist change despite how well intended the efforts to improve 43 performance. 44 • Systems are"perfectly" designed to produce the results we are getting. 45 0 We spend enormous time, effort and money fixing problems we don't really understand.