Ventana software support forum

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> To be realistic about it, taking John Sterman's advice into account, the metrics that matter are measures of impact on customers -- with the resulting impact on the player. So, while it would require a bit of work, I would sugg...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Allow me to be both a little practical and a little cynical about this issue. Before doing so, however, I will say that it makes sense for the simulation community to work on a clean set of criteria for choosing ""bes...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Check out the Lean Construction folks: http:/www.leanconstruction.org They don't do SD modeling, but have a whole lot of information that would be useful in a modeling effort. They have developed software for construction proje...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Tim and others, One approach that helps me is to think about what makes any scientific theory plausible. 1. It must explain the phenomena of interest -- which means, you must be able to derive or create the phenomena using the ...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> You might also want to find a copy of Dennis Meadows' book, ""Dynamics of Commodity Production Cycles."" Even though his model has been extended by Sterman (in ""Business Dynamics""), I f...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> It might be time (at the risk of insulting everyone's intelligence) to remember what mathematics really is when applied to helping us understand the natural world. Even doing something as simple as using numbers to count object...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Jack Homer makes an excellent point, as he usually does, when he talks about putting a ""stake in the ground."" I have found this method useful in lots of non-SD situations, as well -- for the same reasons J...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> I have been helping companies with strategic thinking for nearly 20 years (I don't much like the term ""strategic planning"" because that generates a report which gathers dust for 12 months and then is disca...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> For fundamental questions about system dynamics, I always find it enlightening to return to the original source -- Jay Forrester. His ""Principles of Systems"" gives very clear, direct answers to most of the...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Emergence is a tricky concept in the philosophy of science, albeit quite attractive intuitively. Carl Hempl, in his ""Aspects of Scientific Explanation,"" wrestled with this concept. Here's what he said (in ...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> This is quite simplistic, but one way to deal with the issue of keeping the picture simpler is simply to call such items (that actually enter into the dynamics as ratios) by a name that implies something else is going on but do...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> I find it useful to ask people to think about ""the process"" that is producing the behavior of interest. [First, of course, we must identify the behavior of interest and create some data about it -- at the ...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> As a way of introducing the power of system dynamics to the uninitiated, I have always wanted to use the ""system archetypes"" described so well by Daniel Kim (and others.) But, the first question that comes...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Jean-Jacques, It's not just true in academia (which prides itself on self-criticism and the scientific method, which is fundamentally skeptical) but also in commerce that being honest about one's products' shortcomings pays off...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Jim (and others), I don't know if my approach applies in whatever context you're working, but with people who are employed and working on understanding their own processes, here's what I do: 1. I teach them traditional "&q...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> I'm shocked by the last two messages from Jean-Jacques Laublé and hardly know where to start to respond. I suspect others out there feel the same way. In the past, Jean-Jacques has written, I thought, insightfully about SD mode...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Rutger, Kim, et al. You might want to take a look at Bradley Gale's book, ""Managing Customer Value"" for data from the PIMS Project (Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies) -- which has a database of more th...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Kim, let me describe a situation I encountered that may, in fact, be a case of customers lost due to lack of marketing. Years ago we studied a business forms printing company and discovered, much to everyone's surprise, that th...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Martin, Since we cannot send attachments through this list, I've sent you a copy of Barry Richmond's article directly. It may also be available on the isee Systems corporate website. While I like Richmond's sensible approach ve...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> First, I would think, you need an operational definition of ""bottleneck."" My work in Lean Six Sigma (process improvement) has taught me that there are (at least) two kinds of bottlenecks: 1. Capacity const...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> The notion that small groups of people are smarter than individuals has certainly shown to be true in my 25 years of testing it. I have been running group sessions over my career in which I break up the participants into small ...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Jay Forrester, although he strikes me as a modest man, IS an authority in SD. That doesn't mean, of course, that he is infallible. But to deny him the position of authority is absurd. Moreover, I have been struck over the sever...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> I am doing much work in Lean Six Sigma consulting these days. One of the fundamental things neophytes learn to do is to flowchart processes within their organizations. And they ALL (almost without exception!) instinctively do i...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> Erling Moxnes writes: ""What the authors could be criticised for is that they did not foresee how the report would be misinterpreted and that they did not prevent this. This may however be just as difficult as ...&quo...

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> I run into a similar dilemma in my ""day job"" - where I am a management consultant helping organizations solve all kinds of problems using a ""tool kit"" of competencies, models, methods...