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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