THE CAPTAIN'S METHOD™Donella H. Meadows
Where this shows up in the Captain’s Method
Meadows works beside Goldratt in Part I. In the Method chapter, where methods are systems and Idea Blocks connect into a Swim Chart, her stocks, flows and feedback loops let members see what the map is producing. In the Constraints chapter, the Traffic Wave shows her point that behavior lives in structure, and her ranking of places to intervene explains why changing a rule or a goal moves more than adjusting a number. In the Measurement chapter her trap of seeking the wrong goal adds a fourth statement of the corruption warning that Ridgway, Goodhart and KITA already make.
- Systems
Stocks, flows, feedback loops and her ranked places to intervene give a working vocabulary for shaping structure and rules.
- Focus
She trains a person to look past events to the structure producing them before deciding where to act.
- Environment
She showed that a system's goals and shared assumptions shape behavior more than its numbers do, the structure that creates the structure.
Donella Meadows was born in Elgin, Illinois, in 1941, earned a PhD in biophysics at Harvard, and joined Jay Forrester's system dynamics group at MIT. She was lead author of The Limits to Growth (1972), the Club of Rome report built on the World3 computer model. She taught at Dartmouth for 29 years, wrote a weekly column called The Global Citizen, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. Her ranked list of twelve places to intervene in a system began on a flip chart during a meeting on global trade.