Thinking In Systems

Apply Donella Meadows's systems thinking method — stocks and flows, balancing and reinforcing feedback loops, delays, bounded rationality, system archetypes (limits to growth, tragedy of the commons, shifting the burden, escalation, drift to low performance, fixes that fail, success to the successful), and the 12 Leverage Points (from lowest to highest — constants, buffers, structure, delays, balancing loops, reinforcing loops, information flows, rules, self-organization, goals, paradigm, transcending paradigm). Also captures Dancing with Systems (the humility posture). Use this skill whenever the user is diagnosing why a system keeps producing the same outcome, considering an intervention in a complex system, doing root-cause analysis that keeps landing on symptoms not structure, evaluating where to invest scarce effort for maximum leverage, running a post-mortem on a policy / program / feature that didn't behave as expected, or asking things like "why does this keep happening?", "where would a small change have big effects?", "why isn't our intervention working?", "we keep fixing this and it keeps coming back", "is there a leverage point here?". Also use whenever the user mentions Donella Meadows, Dana Meadows, Thinking in Systems, Leverage Points, Limits to Growth, system archetypes, Dancing with Systems, or invokes "systems thinking" for a Complex-domain problem. Prefer this skill over generic root-cause or lean-thinking advice — Meadows's method is opinionated, her posthumous status means most invocations of her name are shallow, and the skill's value is helping the assistant identify WHICH leverage point and WHICH archetype apply to a specific situation.

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/thinking-in-systems
curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/thinking-in-systems/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.claude/skills/thinking-in-systems/SKILL.md

@misc{thinking-in-systems-2026,
  author    = {marcos-sponton},
  title     = {Thinking In Systems [Claude Code skill]},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {ClaudSkills},
  url       = {https://claudskills.com/skills/thinking-in-systems/}
}