The Systems Bible

Claudius Link reviewed The systems bible by John Gall

Special writing style, mixed content

3 stars

The book provides food for though and a ton of examples on what can go wrong in systems. I found the style of writing hard to read. Only roughly half of the book is real "content", the other half is tests, worksheets, glossary and lists of referenced examples.

simulo reviewed The systems bible by John Gall

None

4 stars

The book gives principles or rule of thumbs on the behavior of cybernetic systems (which can be almost anything: Companies, machines, nation states…).
The style is direct and dry and the assertions tend to be more cranked-up rather than careful; fittingly, what I called “rule of thumbs” is refereed to as “axioms” of system behavior.
The author gives many examples, mostly ones where things go wrong due to being unaware of the systems behavior pointed out in the rules. These examples are often several decades old, on the other hand, they are still easy to understand and illustrate the points well, so the do want they should and it is probably better than referring to some hyped technology that might be forgotten in 5 years.
I enjoyed collecting own examples for the rules and connecting them to other ideas from psychology, project management or anthropology.