Twelve Principles of Living Systems

Educator and writer Linda Booth Sweeney believes that all people have an innate “intelligence” about systems. In her work, she helps people recognize the shifts we need to make—in perspective and in habits of mind—to tap into that capacity in a more integrated, more effective way. A first step is to start recognizing the systems principles constantly at work in the world around us.

Here is a partial list of enduring understandings related to Living Systems:


Interdependence
A relationship in which each partner affects and often needs the other.

System Integrity
What a system has when all the parts and processes essential to its ability to function are present.

Biodiversity
The variety, complexity, and abundance of species that, if adequate, make ecosystems healthy and resilient.

Cooperation and Partnership
The continual process in which species exchange energy and resources.

Rightness of Size
The proportions of living systems–their bigness or smallness and their built-in limitations to growth–that influence a system’s stability and sustainability.

Living Cycles
A cycle is a circular process that repeats over and over, frequently returning to where it began. The water, lunar, sleep and other cycles sustain life, circulate resources, and provide opportunities for renewal.

Waste = Food
When waste from one system becomes food for another. All materials in nature are valuable, continuously circulating in closed loops of production, use, and recycling.

Feedback
Circular processes that create growth or decay by amplifying change (reinforcing feedback) or, foster stability by counteracting or lessening change (balancing feedback).

Nonlinearity
A type of behavior in which the effect is disproportionate from the cause.

Emergent Properties
Behavior that arises out of the interactions within a specific set of parts: the health of an ecosystem or a team’s performance, for example.

Flux
The continual movement of energy, matter and information that moves through living systems. Flux enables the living or “open” system to remain alive, flexible and ever-changing. The sun, for instance, provides a constant flux or flow of energy and resources that feeds all living organisms.

The Commons
Shared resources – such as air, water, land, highways, fisheries, energy, and minerals – on which we depend and for which we are all responsible.