Rich Jolly > Quotes

“Senge (1990) introduced the idea of system archetypes as being connections of feedback loops and delays”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“In Melanie Mitchell's excellent text on complexity science, Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009), she devotes Chapter 7 to Defining and Measuring Complexity.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Storing information as a story, linked with causality, could help meet the biological need to efficiently store, retrieve, and reduce the dimensionality of information.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Modeling—a process to develop a representation of reality to understand, communicate, or predict.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Using system models to identify high leverage points is the primary method of finding unanticipated solutions!”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Google has studied this with their prediction markets and found evidence for better information flow for employees who were physically closer together (Cowgill et al., 2009).”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“As an ultimate example of emergence, consider your own consciousness that is emerging from the connections of neurons in your brain.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“if you have chosen the most prominent expert to work on a problem, the performance of a diverse group containing that expert will outperform that expert on his own.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Dynamic simulators create the behavior of the system by solving the imbedded sets of differential equations using mathematical approximation techniques.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“A Black Swan event has three important characteristics. 1. The event is unexpected, or considered improbable, to the observer. 2. The event has a major impact on the observer. 3.       In hindsight, the observer rationalizes that they "should have seen it coming." This, then, is a narrative fallacy”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“By its morphology, an antifragile object should be the opposite of a fragile object. So, something that is antifragile should gain, or get better in some way, from variations.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“System variables are frequently not being uncontrollably manipulated by outside agencies like puppets on a string, but rather are responding to the hidden structures (feedback and delay) contained in the system.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Complexity can be categorized into two types: combinatorial and dynamic.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“sharing of information has increased the efficacy of the organization.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Some of the world's best poker players use random choice to determine when to bluff.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“there are excellent tools for network topology analysis. Gephi is one such tool, and their short YouTube video titled Introducing Gephi 0.7 gives a nice overview of the capabilities of this class of tool.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“proper use and avoidance of pitfalls of models is crucial.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“It was the dominance of the choice to rat out the other that drove the group to a deficient outcome. The individuals were rational, but the group was irrational!”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“The negative effects of virtuous turned vicious loops is an extremely important lesson to keep in mind.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Diversity Prediction Theorem, which asserts that diversity and accuracy contribute equally to group performance. This says, in essence, that it is equally important to have a diverse group as to have an accurate group.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“In the early phases, the structure exhibits exponential growth. This identifies the reinforcing loop. However, the balancing loop is effectively dormant. It's only later in time that the balancing loop reveals itself in the data set.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Fragility is defined as a susceptibility to variation.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“if your business ecosystem seems stable, don't be lulled into a potentially false sense of security. Big changes can happen very quickly. Don't confuse low volatility with low risk. Andy Grove, former Intel CEO, was fond of saying "Only the paranoid survive." These are wise words. Models used in business often do very well in periods of stability, but fail miserably in times of sudden changes. They work well when you don't need them and fail when you need them the most.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“The term we use for the unanticipated result from these interactions is emergence. While not all interactions create emergent effects, when emergence does occur it is difficult, if not practically impossible, to predict based on the study of the components of the system. From this standpoint, one might characterize systems thinking as the antithesis of reductionism.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Just because an individual ant seems to wander around aimlessly, doesn't mean a colony of ants will behave this way. This is sometimes known as the fallacy of composition.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“System 2 burns a lot of fuel (glucose from the bloodstream), and the tendency to accept the recommendations of System 1 reduces its overall fuel usage.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“The scientific method asserts that one cannot prove a hypothesis, only disprove it. Seeing more white swans may strengthen the hypothesis, but seeing a black swan can disprove it. The confirmation bias, the search for data that confirms existing beliefs (versus alternatives), accentuates this effect in humans.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“Qualitative system dynamics is a powerful tool to help categorize behaviors as endogenous or exogenous with respect to the system under study.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight

“We must constantly be on guard for assumptions of simple causality, constructing narrative fallacies, making inference errors, and so on.”
― Rich Jolly, Systems Thinking for Business: Capitalize on Structures Hidden in Plain Sight