Quiz
- Once everyone picked up the rope, but before the game started, what was it doing?
- Once the game started, how did what the rope was doing change?
- Before you started, what would have happened if two people from one team dropped the rope?
- What if one person had pulled hard on the rope?
- Once you started what would have happened if those same two people dropped the rope?
- What if someone had pulled harder on the rope?
- How long did the game last?
- Would the rope have stayed still for longer if you hadn’t started playing?
The rope is largely still both before and during play, but the way the system behaves is completely different. The rope during play is part of a much more unstable system, that can easily collapse.
Understanding what will cause or prevent collapse needs us to look at the whole system. Otherwise, we don’t know what impact pulling on the rope, or removing people from a team will have.
System collapse might not be a bad thing; sometimes we might want to collapse a system rather than balance it. But we have to understand the system to have that choice.
