Have you ever wondered why, despite the significant aid rich countries provide, poor countries remain poor? One possible reason is that money is not the most limiting factor. Perhaps education is. Or the quality of human resources. Maybe even geographical location plays a role.

Limiting factor is a concept we’ve long understood but rarely reflect on deliberately. It was one of many ideas I discovered while reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows et al.

Money, education, human resources, and geographical location are interconnected, forming part of a system. Systems exhibit their own behaviors and patterns over time. Thinking in systems means moving beyond linear thought—we broaden our view, considering surrounding factors and eliminating boundaries as much as possible.

Here are a few concepts I handpicked that I think are worth noting…

Stock, inflow, and outflow

Imagine a bathtub as a system. The water inside is the stock. Inflow adds water, and outflow drains it. Many systems follow this pattern.

Delays, lags or buffer

Think of planting a seed. The time between planting and sprouting is a delay or buffer, showing how changes don’t happen immediately in a system.

Balancing vs. reinforcing feedback loop

A balancing feedback loop adjusts to maintain stability, like a thermostat regulating temperature. A reinforcing feedback loop amplifies change, like a snowball growing as it rolls downhill.

Universe is organised into hierarchies

Systems are structured in hierarchies. A company has a CEO at the top, with department heads reporting to them. Cities consist of suburbs. Our bodies are made of cells.

The world is continuum

Boundaries don’t truly exist—they’re tools for discussion. We invent labels like “teenager” and “adult” to simplify complex realities, but these distinctions should always be reconsidered in context.

Limiting factor

Apart from the example at the beginning of the article, here’s another analogy. Imagine you’re baking cookies. You have plenty of flour, sugar, and eggs but no butter. Here, butter becomes the limiting factor, prevent you to make progress until it’s replenished.

Bounded rationality

People make decisions based on the information available, shaped by incentives, goals, and constraints. For instance, when grocery shopping, your choices are limited by what’s available in shelves, your budget, and the time you have.

Policy resistance

Consider a traffic light installed at an intersection to reduce accidents. Instead, drivers now speed to beat the red light, increasing accident risks. This is policy resistance — the system (driver behavior) pushes back, producing unintended outcomes.

Eroding goal (aka. “boiled frog syndrome”)

Imagine your department receives a yearly budget. In Q4, you’ve spent only 40%, so you rush to use the rest, fearing next year’s budget might be reduced. The original goal of efficient spending shifts to an unintended one: maintaining budget levels.

Personally, learning to think in systems helps me stay humble. I’ll never fully understand everything the universe has to offer.

If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete