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REINFORCING AND BALANCING PROCESSES
Human social systems—like
organizations—can
seem pretty complicated. However, they're really made up of
just two kinds of building blocks. We call these building
blocks reinforcing and balancing processes. Reinforcing processes
create exponential growth and collapse; for example, the world
population explosion or the U.S. stock market crash of the
1930s. Balancing processes keep a situation at equilibrium.
You can sense this balancing taking place in organizations
where it's hard to make a change, or when a company's sudden
growth seems to hit a plateau.
It's
the number and particular combinations of reinforcing and
balancing processes within a system that cause that system's
complex—and
sometimes baffling—behavior.
Systems thinking can help you understand how those two kinds
of processes are interacting to produce troublesome behavior,
and how you might better manage those processes.
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