Systems that we we know very well may seem transparent, but we will end up misunderstanding them if we focus too much on their output and not enough on their true behavior or the way they operate over time. The issue is, since a system's outputs are its most visible aspect, we often simplify systems into a series of events. It is easy for us to only focus our attention to games won and lost, or the percentage of the rainforest that has been deforested.

So, imagine for a moment that you are watching a baseball game in which both teams are evenly matched, but one team is playing amazingly well. When they do win the game, the result will be less surprising to you than to someone who only sees the final score.

But unfortunately that's not the only mistake we make. We also tend to anticipate linear relatioships, desipte of the non-linear of our world. For example, say you add five pounds of fertilizer to a field, and it produces three bushels of wheat. You might expect that adding ten pounds of fertilizer would produce six bushels of wheat.

However, real life doesn't usually work that way. If you do add ten pounds of fertilizer your yield might remain the same or even less because the excess nutrients damage the soil, reducing its productivity.

And lastly, humans oftentimes forget that systems are very rarely separate from one another. That is because our minds have a finite processing capacity. So, to simplify, we mentally separate each system.

However, it is easy to forget that those boundaries are imaginary and we can become so used to them that they feel natural. The result is an unfortunate tendency to think in terms that are either too broad or too narrow.

As an example, if you are brainstorming ways to reduce carbon emissions, producing a detailed model of the planets climate will overly complicate the process, but focusing only on the automotive industry would prove equally fruitless.