Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up. It fails because it ignores that systems fight back.

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Complex systems resist deliberate design and fight back against imposed changes, following Le Chatelier's Principle from chemistry. Successful systems like the electric grid and internet evolved from simple working prototypes through iteration, not comprehensive planning. Government technology failures like HealthCare.gov demonstrate the limits of systems thinking when applied to complex human systems. The key insight is Gall's Law: complex systems that work invariably evolved from simple systems that worked. Examples like Operation Warp Speed and Estonia's digital government show success comes from starting fresh with simple systems outside existing bureaucracy, not trying to fix broken complex ones.

Magical systems thinking

Clicked for the cool Factorio art, ended up with an interesting read.

Always love content that mixed ideology and technical.

I like the emphasis on starting simple and iterating, but I wish the article would highlight a bit more of the downsides of the “quick workarounds” approach. The new, simple system doesn’t always replace the old one; sometimes it just grows alongside it, leading to confusing and duplication (<a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Standards</a>, anyone?).
You also risk upsetting the people who do follow established rules and systems by fast-tracking stuff, penalizing one group by favoring another. And unless you’re very careful, you risk skipping over the very edge cases that made the original system so complicated in the first place (there are parallels to code refactoring here).
In its current form, it sounds like “start small and iterate” is the vastly superior solution, but in my experience - even the direct one with Factorio - the first factory you build ends up a terrible mess of spaghetti. In Factorio, you have the luxury of easy and cost-neutral massive rebuilds and refactorings. This is not something that can be applied to the real world.
In the end, I wish the article had explored more on how to make systems iteration sustainable, not just successful in the short run.

At first, i thought it was clash of clans.