Summary
System archetypes are a small set of recurring patterns in how systems behave, each drawn as a diagram of feedback loops and delays. They come from system dynamics and reached a wide audience through Peter Senge’s ‘The Fifth Discipline’ (1990). The idea is that very different situations share a structure, so recognising the pattern suggests where to act.
In ‘shifting the burden’, a quick fix eases the symptoms while the real cause is left alone, as when debts are paid by borrowing. In ‘escalation’, each side answers the other’s move, as in an arms race. In ‘tragedy of the commons’, everyone draws on a shared resource until it’s used up.
Rationale
A catalogue of ways interventions backfire: Part 1 calls unintended consequences “intrinsic to any intervention”. But archetypes assume loops can be drawn; in culture, cause and effect are “difficult, maybe impossible, to reliably track”.