Below is a fantastic quote I came across when reading The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. A fantastic read that is full of wisdom.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
Whether it is Taiichi Ohno and Toyota Production System - urging workers to address problems at their root cause, Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline - asserting that to resolve a problem the problem needs to be addressed in terms of a whole system and not just the immediately observable parts of the sub system, or whether it is me - blogging about the root problem. The same message occurs again and again.
Of all the quotes I have come across on this topic though, this quote by Robert Pirsig is one of the best
