System Understanding Quotes

Management does not know what a system is.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

I think I learned more than most rookies learned just because the stuff with injuries and everything like that. But I think I had great vets who taught me the system quick. Most stories I hear is, most rookies get left on their own because the vets have got their business to take care of, but with me, I felt like we were all connected.

I'm a veteran. I understand the game. I can control a game. I understand systems. I can play several positions.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

Please, please, please, my dear competition. We can beat each other and fight each other as much as we want and argue, but do not predict how a system really works when you really don't know and don't want to know. Either be better informed, or don't do it.

Simply put, when you have very large pieces of software, most of the tools look at the individual lines of code as text. It is often extremely powerful to look not at individual pieces of code but at a system as a whole.

I look back now and realize you have to learn the system. Not kiss ass, but you have to learn the system.

The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.

What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.

A leader has to know how the system functions - not just the system of government but the whole social and economic system, including business, the unions, and the universities.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.