When actors pull a system towards conflicting goals, an intervention on one goal is absorbed and the system snaps back.
Meadows's term. Rent control, drug enforcement and traffic engineering all show it: the system contains actors pulling toward other goals, and the intervention is absorbed rather than resisted openly.
In practice
- Rent control caps rents and reduces supply, so the average tenant's cost is unchanged and the queue is longer.
- A firm that caps its support headcount finds the ticket backlog restores the same waiting time it had before the cap.
- Subject
- Design & Systems
- Essay
- Why systems behave against intuition