Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows [[A stock is the memory of the history of changing flows within the system]] [[A stock can be increased by either increasing its inflow or decreasing its outflow]] [[Stocks allow inflows and outflows to be decoupled and to be independent and temporarily out of balance with each other]] [[Changes in stocks set the pace of the dynamics of systems]]