I read Thinking in Systems: A Primer.
Donella Meadows wrote this classic on systems thinking. She reframes the world not as a collection of parts but as a web of interconnected relationships, using concepts such as stocks, flows, feedback loops, and delays.
What stuck with me most was her stance of looking at structure rather than blaming individual parts. The same structure keeps producing the same behavior, so finding leverage points—places where a small intervention yields a large effect—matters far more than reacting to symptoms.
Software engineers design and operate systems every day, so much of this overlaps with our work. I want to revisit this book often as a foundation for seeing the underlying structure and fixing problems at the root, rather than only patching the symptoms in front of me.