QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

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""Jack Homer"" <jhomer@comcas
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Jack Homer"" <jhomer@comcas »

Posted by ""Jack Homer"" <jhomer@comcast.net>

The idea that the field has been growing at a rate of 10-20% per year sounded like an old estimate to me, so I decided to look at some actual data. Thanks to Roberta Spencer for the raw data; any errors in calculation of average growth rates (AGR) below are mine alone.

SD Society Membership:
Global: 1985-167, 1996-572, 2000-946, 2005-1052; AGR 85-05: 9.6%, AGR 85-96: 11.8%, AGR 96-05: 7.0%, AGR 00-05: 2.1%

North America: 1996-315, 2000-422, 2005-485; AGR 96-05: 4.9%, AGR 00-05: 2.8%

Europe: 1996-160, 2000-358, 2005-373; AGR 96-05: 9.9%, AGR 00-05: 0.8%

Rest of World: 1996-97, 2000-166, 2005-194; AGR 96-05: 8.0%, AGR 00-05: 3.2%

ISDC Attendance (selecting only North America East Coast conferences for
consistency):
1990 Boston-191, 1996 Boston-275, 1998 Quebec-331, 2001 Atlanta-352,
2003 NYC-460, 2005 Boston-521. AGR 90-05: 6.9%, AGR 98-05: 6.4%.

Conclusion: Although we may have grown at that 10-20% rate in the more distant past, we have grown at only single-digit rates, and in decelerating fashion, since the 1990s. (Society membership and conference attendance seem like reasonably good gauges for size of the field. If anyone has other relevant and available time series, those would be interesting to see.)

In SD, we pride ourselves at looking squarely at the facts and not trying to gloss them over with wishful thinking. Can't we just get over the notion that we're going to have big numbers someday? Let's buckle down to do what a small field must do if it is to succeed: Stop tilting at windmills on our own, and work and publish collaboratively with people from other fields, esp. experts in application areas.

Jack Homer
Posted by ""Jack Homer"" <jhomer@comcast.net> posting date Tue, 9 Jan 2007 13:25:33 -0500 _______________________________________________
Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@we
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@we »

Posted by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@web.de>

Just a few short thoughts that I have posted in the SIG Business recently:

As being pretty new to the field of SD (since July 2006) I am following the question for myself why it sometimes takes so much effort and time to get a thing/idea going. And the SD-community is definitely pretty small over here in Europe -compared with the ones over in Northern America.

One way to overcome that is:

1. You must have a -(rather) big and measurable- problem to solve (concerning processes you can change personally in one way or the other)

2. There has to be a combination of SD and other fields that are closely or loosely related such as LEAN, SixSigma, Learning Organizations, Leadership, etc.

3. A functional network around you at all possible stages, starting from colleagues at the shop floor, managers, professors, friends, family, you name it;-) is a good way to spin off new ideas and thoughts.

4. Start discussions on obvious points and find out who amongst your network is able to function as an accelerator bringing these ahead and to practise (don't depend on yourself).

5. Be patient (!) and don't give up (I have waited for LEAN THINKING to arise around my business place for about 10 years now)

6. Grab possibilities in your personal surroundings to test System Thinking and System Dynamics (even though that is rather difficult for a real beginner as I am one;-() to keep the ball and thoughts running!

Looks like a recipe - but it's not. It is just an idea and I must admit I have the feeling this seems to work -slowly very slowly but steadily:-))

Looking forward to further discussion and new points to be made

Ralf


PS.: Seems to be that one idea leads to another one which is getting the progress going
--


-----------
Ralf Lippold
Elsbethstraße 7
D-04155 Leipzig-Gohlis
Posted by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@web.de>
posting date Tue, 9 Jan 2007 21:18:24 +0100
_______________________________________________
Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci »

Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>

>> What publications should people on this list be targeting for articles?
>> Why? How? (e.g the New York Times Op Ed page? A blog somewhere?).

I don't think we _know_. That's why I think effectual reasoning may be appropriate in this case. See http://preview.tinyurl.com/y3qul3, or just do something, and see what happens.

As much as ""where?"", the question ""about what?"" arises quickly. As I wrote the other day, I suspect that it's not in our best interest to push SD as a tool most of the time.

There are some of us blogging already. My blog doesn't cover SD all (or, explicitly, even much) of the time, but, then again, that's consistent with the message I tried to give in my recent post.

If you're inspired to start a blog (or if you already have one), or if you publish articles for the general public elsewhere, let us know; you might find others of us pointing to your work!

Bill
- --
Bill Harris
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>
posting date Tue, 09 Jan 2007 05:55:25 -0800 _______________________________________________
""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasys
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasys »

Posted by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasystems.com>

>>>> A small field...if it is to succeed [must] publish collaboratively
>>>> with people from other fields...

I think Jack is encouraging us to do good work. But to avoid possible
misinterpretation:

1) We must have grown much faster than 10-20% in the more distant past.
The growth rate over the past 50 years is around 15%, even if we only count members of the Society today.

2) The growth rate was much higher when people in SD were publishing fearlessly independent views.

3) The last fifteen years or so has seens a large relative and absolute increase in writing designed to appeal to other fields -- particularly other academic fields. This period corresponds to the slow-down in growth that Jack writes about.

Conclusion: While there's no harm in writing in ways that appeal to different viewpoints, there's also no reason to discourage people from writing from a fearlessly SD viewpoint. Personally, I'd like to see more writing that is powerful and new enough to stir up controversy.

Jim Hines
Posted by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasystems.com> posting date Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:02:49 -0500 _______________________________________________
""eric wolstenholme"" <eric.w
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""eric wolstenholme"" <eric.w »

Posted by ""eric wolstenholme"" <eric.wolstenholme@symmetricsd.co.uk>

Jack's email on growth of the SD field as measured thought the performance of the SD society, prompted this contribution to the debate on use (or perceived lack of use) of SD in government policy making.

I would argue that using the society as an indicator is not representative of the growth of the field. It might be the only quantification we have but I perceive Jack's figures to be the tip of the iceberg, certainly in the UK.
There are many, many users of ST and SD who do not see the society as relevant to their needs, since it does not have the status of an accredited 'chartered' body that is essential to practice.

What is perhaps a better indicator is how many people are in the pipeline upstream of society members, in the states of 'awareness of SD', 'deliverers of SD' and 'users of SD'.

In the UK I would conservatively estimate that there are currently at least 10 consultancies actively using SD, each with a cumulative SD client base over the past 5 years in the order of 5000. Also over the last 10 years Universities and consultancies through both open and in-house courses have trained around 5000 people directly in SD and exposed the thinking to many more. I am not suggesting that all these people have copies of SD software on their desks, but exposure to SD and strong word of mouth of the benefits does go on.

It would be good to have these types of estimates from elsewhere.

Further, there is also a great deal going on in government use of SD in the UK, both directly by civil servants and through consulting, much of which is proving very influential. Despite our attempts in Symmetric, what gets published is a very small part of the whole because there is not time to do this given the demands for projects.

I feel the whole debate is similar to the one I have encountered often in Operational Research. ST and SD are generic and will never have the pure recognition some people seek. They are a way of thinking and a tool kit subsumed in so many other disciplines that few will ever aspire to have the words in their job title. And if they do they will be considered to be too specifically focussed.

Best Wishes
Eric

--------------------------------------
Professor Eric Wolstenholme
Director
Symmetric SD Ltd
Posted by ""eric wolstenholme"" <eric.wolstenholme@symmetricsd.co.uk>
posting date Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:03:04 -0000 _______________________________________________
""Jack Ring"" <jring@amug.org
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Jack Ring"" <jring@amug.org »

Posted by ""Jack Ring"" <jring@amug.org>


Further to Jack Homer's recent stats, I am impressed by the % of members who also attend Conferences (East Coast US only).

Divisors are approximate.

> 1990 Boston-191/370, 1996 Boston-275/572, 1998 Quebec-331/760, 2001
> Atlanta-352/1000,
> 2003 NYC-460/1000, 2005 Boston-521/1052. >


Other societies I frequent experience only about one half the % participation that SD has experienced.

Reminds me of a favorite saying of one of our old college cheerleaders, ""I may be small but I'm wound tight.""

cheers,
Jack Ring
Posted by ""Jack Ring"" <jring@amug.org>
posting date Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:03:44 -0700 _______________________________________________
""Kim Warren"" <Kim@strategyd
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Kim Warren"" <Kim@strategyd »

Posted by ""Kim Warren"" <Kim@strategydynamics.com>

In an effort to gauge at least a piece of the invisible part of the field here in the UK, the UK Chapter recently tried searching for anyone claiming to teach anything SD-related in University courses of any kind.
[We wanted to find any lonely souls out there who might welcome the chance to be part of a wider community]. We found quite a few mentions of SD, e.g. as small elements in wider OR programs or coverage in technology courses of various kinds - almost all at Masters level. There were also some odd-balls, e.g. in medicine and astronomy. But disappointingly the search did not identify a large hidden part of the SD ice-berg, at least not in academia.

There may be much bigger ice-bergs in public policy and business consulting but I have only anecdotal evidence - and as this discussion has already highlighted, locating those icebergs is not easy.

I don't know if there is an easily organised way of tracking media-mentions of SD, other than in academic journals, like the tracking that Corporate communications departments do to identify the level of awareness of their companies and products. Aside from being just interesting to know, it would probably only be worth doing if the Society or SIGs felt there was something valuable they could do with the information to publicise the field's contribution.

Otherwise, Jack's suggestion to just get on with it [if I paraphrase accurately] seems right.

Kim
Posted by ""Kim Warren"" <Kim@strategydynamics.com> posting date Wed, 10 Jan 2007 12:25:22 -0000 _______________________________________________
John Raddall <john@quantacons
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by John Raddall <john@quantacons »

Posted by John Raddall <john@quantaconsulting.co.za>

As a new name on the SD mailing list I have followed the debate with interest and add the following notes which may be useful.

I have worked as a consultant with leaders and their organisations for nearly two decades, and despite the attraction of an algorithmic approach to human systems I have found the human condition to remain completely unfathomable!

Briefly we have a model whereby leadership Œenergy¹ is the primary driver of system performance. Leadership Œenergy¹ drives the Œorganisational energy¹ which in turn generates customer satisfaction and profitability. We measure leadership and organisational Œenergy¹ and facilitate a process to increase both. Where this is successful we predict a positive impact on system performance. This is a slightly different approach to re-engineering a dynamic system where the underlying assumption here is that human systems are simply too complex to manage at the detail level. Rather the view is held that the way to impact a system is to make specific changes at key leverage points, and that the system will automatically adapt and find a new point of equilibrium.

If government agencies are not using SD techniques it is simply because:

* They don¹t have to.
* They don¹t want to.

Generally government agencies worldwide have relatively low system energy, are re-active, political and not particularly innovative, and employees are rewarded to keep the system just as it is. I would suggest that a successful SD intervention requires high energy, motivation, intelligence, a strong sense of purpose, a pioneering spirit, an ability to take risks, and a passion for innovation and problem solving. If you find a government agency with such core capabilities it is probably already using SD! Worded differently I am suggesting that the Œenergy¹ level of a human system fundamentally determines its ability to innovate and do work. That is an SD intervention requires a threshold Œenergy¹ level which is probably above most government agencies. Raise the system¹s leadership and organisational Œenergy¹ levels above this threshold and the probability of SD success may increase exponentially.

The dimension of human systems that I still find unfathomable is the way in which the human brain makes decisions, which of course directly impacts human systems. A recent book by Read Montague (Professor in the department of neuroscience Baylor College of Medicine) ³Why Choose this Book² provides great insights into the impact of dopamine in our brains and the way in which ideas can create rewards and a unique reality for each individual.
This model suggests for example that all SD exponents may share a similar dopamine Œrush¹ when faced with any SD stimulus, as well as the attendant re-affirmation of purpose, truth and reality, whereas our trusty government non-SD exponent when faced with similar SD stimuli, will remain blissfully in dopamine dormancy.

Government agencies therefore will never buy an SD solution because someone thinks it is a good idea. They will buy it when the dopamine starts to flush the neurons generating the right feelings about SD.



John Raddall
Quanta Consulting
Block B, The Pavilion,
Cnr 9th Ave and Wessel Road, Rivonia, 2128 P O Box 1598, Sunninghill 2157 Posted by John Raddall <john@quantaconsulting.co.za> posting date Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:25:45 +0200 _______________________________________________
Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci »

Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>

>> The idea that the field has been growing at a rate of 10-20% per year
>> sounded like an old estimate to me, so I decided to look at some
>> actual

Jack,

Of course, there's the question of how to measure growth. Assuming that SDS membership is a useful proxy for the number of people doing SD (and ignoring what ""doing SD"" means), one could also look on this as a production function:

SD projects
done per year
----- +-------------------+
============>( )==============>| Cumu. SD Projects |
----- +-------------------+
^ ^-
/- ---
/- ---
/- projects per
+--------/----+ member per year
| SDS Members |
+-------------+

Thus the size of the field (SD projects done per year) could be the integral of SDS membership times some constant representing the average number of projects per person per year. The number of projects per person per year may grow over time as people become more proficient (assuming they can find the need), too.

As I think you noted elsewhere, though, how important is this really?
What's the real problem? Is it that we see too high a fraction of governmental decisions being bad (the subject of this thread)? Then that's perhaps the major component of the RBP, with SD and other techniques as potential productivity aids to reduce that stock.

Bill

PS: If anyone is curious, I created the stock and flow diagram using artist-mode in Emacs. One can also do text-mode graphs using the dumb terminal in Gnuplot.
--
Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
Facilitated Systems
Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>
posting date Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:44:49 -0800 _______________________________________________
""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@ »

Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu>

Jim, I'm continuing a campaign to get ""systems thinking"" operationalized within the public health policy circles in the US.

Here's a post from my weblog (""Perspectives in Public Health"") this morning:
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/01/l ... ences.html

Comments welcome.

Wade Schuette, MBA
(MPH Student, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) Ann Arbor, MI Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu> posting date Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:50:49 -0500 _______________________________________________
Richard Stevenson <richard@co
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Richard Stevenson <richard@co »

Posted by Richard Stevenson <richard@cognitus.co.uk>

I'm sure this thread is approaching a conclusion but hope to add one more perspective. In particular I'd like to suggest some home truths for the SD community and to suggest one way forward.

Eric Wolstenholme wrote ""I would argue that using the society as an indicator is not representative of the growth of the field. It might be the only quantification we have but I perceive Jack's figures to be the tip of the iceberg, certainly in the UK.
There are many, many users of ST and SD who do not see the society as relevant to their needs, since it does not have the status of an accredited 'chartered' body that is essential to practice.""

Eric and I worked together for over a decade to train nearly 2000 managers in ST and SD. So there is certainly far more interest out there than there might appear from inside the society. But it is my strong impression that interest fades quite quickly because SD does not build upon itself - there's no way for interested but busy managers to practise their embryonic skills in isolation.

An issue here, as Eric point out, is that there is no SD “profession” to support them - that term implies organisation and strong self-regulation.
The international System Dynamics Society has a tiny membership and acts as a forum rather than a management organisation; it does not attempt to set standards, nor to regulate the practise of SD.

So the term “SD community” is here used instead to describe practitioners in the field - mainly academics, software companies and “consultants”. SD practitioners tend to behave like cats – they co- exist (just about) but hunt alone, with different personal and commercial motives and different ideas of how to apply the tools in the business world.

There is a real independent tendency at the heart of the SD community. Academics vie with each other – often seeming to become ever more obscure. Independent software companies design and market progressively more complex (and hence less
useful?) simulation software, none of which is compatible. And SD consultants abound with widely differing capabilities, competing fiercely for clients and certainly rarely collaborating. The impression is of a jungle – to the detriment of system dynamics overall.

“Herding cats”…is a phrase I have heard used by SD practitioners themselves to describe the nature and behaviour of the SD community.

If SD really is as powerful as its practitioners believe, we need to question why most business managers are still ignorant and disinterested. I suggest a number of reasons that are largely the responsibility of SD’s own proponents and practitioners.

(a) Incomprehension and ingrained resistance to systemic thinking in the
business world,
(b) Lack of standards and inconsistent behaviour within the “SD community”
itself,
(c) Conflicting SD software standards and damaging competition between
software vendors,
(d) Poor consulting practices and fragmentation across the consulting
industry,
(e) Lack of market focus in developing SD applications.

I could go on. It is the SD community itself that must bear the responsibility for slow growth. Hardly a good advertisement for the method itself!

So what to do? Well, speaking personally, I am more committed than ever to the ideas of SD but have ceased to ""sell"" SD itself as a solution to anything. The ""bottom-up"" approach (including strategy dynamics) may be intellectually appealing to some managers, but sadly it just doesn't stick.

Rather, I believe the future is to ""wrap"" SD into more familiar management issues and use it to enhance, rather than replace, existing toolsets. In particular, I believe SD has much to offer to integrate tools such as balanced scorecards, strategy maps, resource- based strategy and DCF valuation. Indeed, it is the ""missing link"" in the value-based management toolset.

The prime market ? Probably the Chief Financial Officer, who is increasingly responsible for strategy and value management. In particular, in capital industries (having long asset life cycles) it is increasingly challenging to balance short/long term thinking and to balance the interests of different management groups and other stakeholders. Regulation (both forward and
retrospective) also places huge new pressures on CFOs.

In partnership with a qualified CFO, I am founding a new organisation to progress these ideas. We will not be a traditional SD consultancy but rather we will network with highly qualified international practitioners from a number of disciplines, including SD, to deliver value-based solutions. We will also build on two decades of front- line SD strategy consulting and teaching experience with blue chip organisations.

I will be pleased to hear from qualified and experienced SD practitioners having sympathy and interest in these ideas. We are looking to build an international network of top-flight practitioners to take SD - and related disciplines - forward in value-based strategic management.

Richard Stevenson
Cognitus Ltd
High Mill Farm
Markington
Harrogate
HG3 3NR
UK
Posted by Richard Stevenson <richard@cognitus.co.uk> posting date Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:52:50 +0000 _______________________________________________
Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jac
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jac »

Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr>

Hi everybody.

In the last thread, the word growth has been often used.

But what kind of growth must we consider?

Obviously the growth considered is a simple growth.

But in the period considered about 50 years, the world population has been expending and the percentage of learned people has been growing too due to the improvement of the education system in all the countries in the world.
The number of problems has been probably growing with the population, but the capacity to solve them should have increased with the improvement of education.

So one could consider studying the ratio number of SD practitioner / number of educated people and see if it is growing too.(not sure)

Logically if the number of learned people is increasing so should be the number of SDers with a delay because learned people won't rush to study SD and will first study simpler technique.

Supposing that this delay is 10 years (probably more) , one should at least observe with a delay the same growth of SD than the general growth of learned people?

One can too choose another denominator for the ratio: for example the number of people dealing with problems having ingrained a sufficient complex dynamic.

By the way what is a complex dynamic explained in current language and how complex must it be?

Are the people dealing with these problems conscious of the dynamic, how do they solve the problems, does it work etc.?

The utility of being more precise about the kind of growth may give some insights about the causes of the growth itself.

I agree too to the point of view of Richard Stenvenson.

Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé Allocar.
Strasbourg France.
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:27:47 +0100 _______________________________________________
j-d <jaideep@optimlator.com&g
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by j-d <jaideep@optimlator.com&g »

Posted by j-d <jaideep@optimlator.com>

Greetings Everyone:

I have been away from the list for a while but have read this topic with much interest. About 5-6 years ago we used to have similar debates and I have seen the same kinds of debates in Operations Research and Urban Planning communities. It is also interesting to see how the writings and thinking of familiar writers on this list has matured.

First a small background - I had academic system dynamics training (Ph. D.
level) and my thesis involved work with large and complex nonlinear optimization models. I had a one-year system dynamics consultancy stint at Sandia Labs, and worked for one year PostDoc fellowship building and trying to sell system dynamics models. Realizing that the market trends, current academic paradigm and hype was simply not working for me, I decided to slowly change to more exciting ventures (for me, that is) in terms of designing web/Windows applications backed by SQL server databases, and I have been very successful at that, and can see gratifying results when people use and compliment about my applications. I went over to the ""dark""
side of linear, flat thinking, so to speak. Hopefully I have a little bit of insider-outsider experience now which informs my perspective - please allow me to share some of it here, especially as I have studied SD, tried it as a consultant, and have given up (mostly) on it.

1. Some people say that SD works for large organizations, but it works so well that it is kept a highly guarded secret and is hidden. I simply do not buy this argument for a minute - with the explosion of information and movement of people within industries, anything that works will not be a big secret for long. We all basically know what makes Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon such great successes - these are essentially technology companies - the problem is that people simply don't have the strategy, the resources and the fortitude to carry out a vision, even if they know what can work. If system dynamics worked as some say it does, then the SD vendors/consultants will themselves push its sales very aggressively, just like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM do for its products, and we will see open-source, service-based competitive offerings everywhere for SD software and tools.

2. There are a wealth of freeware, shareware, beerware tools for almost any other aspect of technology - not so many for system dynamics - we will see many such tools if people found them useful. Simple market dynamics. If anyone knows of good inexpensive SD tools, I am interested in knowing which ones.

3. Some people say good SD is hard, but then programming and designing databases is hard - there are amazing tools to make these tasks easier (I am familiar with vb.net and sql server so that is where I am coming from). I haven't seen the most recent versions of SD software, but what I had seen was either too simple (Stella/iThink), or with many more exciting features but not so easy to use (Vensim, e. g.).

4. The returns from process improvements and usage of even simple applications using programming and database tools is amazing (in my view actually small apps and changes are better than big apps and projects, as they allow for agility and dumping of bad ideas very quickly). SD simply does not have quick returns. Great insights based on simulations but then what. Earlier on the list, I used to be a big advocate of good clean data, because I was realizing that non-SD users simply didn't trust my story after a while - it almost always seemed like a good but toyish exercise to the customers. I had the feeling that data had a lower value to simulation-based insights for people on this list and even for some SD software vendors. I remember once showing my work in an SD job interview where I was asked why a particular relationship wasn't included even though intuitively it made sense to have it - I said I didn't include it because previous regression studies showed no need to include it - the person insisted that it should have been there - I didn't get the job and I didn't care much for it either after these kinds of questions. Point of story: even SDers fail to see their own biases and throw out econometric results just because it is ""evil, linear thinking"".

An example from aikido as a martial art that I have practiced for 15 years
now: you can do all the simulations and kata in the dojo (hence gaining great insights, just like in current SD way of doing things), but a dose of street reality (real world business) can very quickly wake you up (or knock you out, which seems to be happening to SD). For people who follow martial arts, think of what happened when Gracies came to the UFC scene, demolishing the myths of many simulation/insight-based arts. Extending Richard Stevenson's analogy of cats, think of independent cats doing aikido and then rushing out to streets on their own to greet thuggish wild cats - not a pretty outcome.

The biggest benefit from SD and systems thinking to me so far has been to be careful of unintended effects in designing large/complex databases/apps, and to think in terms of chunks/interfaces and so on (of course, these insights are also available in OO programming). Also, computers have become much more powerful (in ten years, when I finished my Ph. D. work on SLOW macintoshes), so I believe a lot of useful work can be done even on home computers (I am talking about multi-player dynamic game optimization stuff).
But without good data, linking with other fields, easy-to-use software, and quick demonstrable returns, SD has little hope.

Best regards - still in love with SD but separated and living with someone else

Jaideep

Jaideep Mukherjee, Ph. D.
Application Services Manager
Star of Hope Mission
Posted by j-d <jaideep@optimlator.com>
posting date Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:30:11 -0600 _______________________________________________
Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci
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QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Bill Harris <bill_harris@faci »

Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>

Jaideep,

It's good to see you here again, even if you are from the dark side
now. :-)

For the last 10 months, I've been using a free simulator professionally and for fun. I've made a well-received presentation regarding its use at a conference. I'm noticing a number of characteristics, among them:

It works on any platform that has gcc and the GNU Scientific Library:
GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows, and probably others.

Models are text, not binary, files (one of the complaints occasionally
raised here).

The process of modeling may be faster, thanks to the process it
encourages. The process seems slower at the start, but I think that's
because it's forcing me to think hard about the modeling from the very
beginning (with a GUI, I can always start laying down a stock or two
before I really start thinking, for I know I'll always need a couple
of stocks).

Simulation is generally much faster, for all models are compiled.
Then again, I run the simulator _far_ less often than I have with
other systems.

Because the simulator is GPL'd, you can't ethically or legally
distribute compiled models (well, perhaps you can under certain
conditions, but I think that means you'd need to distribute all the
sources and build instructions for all the libraries that get compiled
into the code, and you'd need compatible licenses for all that code; I
don't think that's feasible legally, at least under Windows). If you
want to send a client a model for them to run, you need to help them
install the simulator and compile the model themselves.

The simulator is open source, so I can see exactly how a simulation is
implemented and modify it, if I wish. Do you know what interpolation
algorithm is used for tabular nonlinearities in the simulator you
currently use? Would you like to use another interpolation algorithm?
(I admit that this usually isn't a big concern.)

There is (almost) no more concern with TIMESTEP or DT! (If there is,
you'll know it, and then you can address it.)

It's a bit more of a pain to implement discrete parts of models, and
tabular nonlinearities do look a bit arcane.

It's got arrays and powerful statistical tools.

To enjoy this simulator, you probably need to be a person who enjoys
*nux-style work: text editors, command line interfaces, and the like.

The code is maintained by a group that uses it for serious
(health-related) work, so they engage in careful quality control.
While it's been around since at least 1992, as best as I can tell,
I've not found anyone else in the SD community using it.

And, most importantly for me, I sense this simulator is helping me think better. Compared to when I used an integrated, GUI system, I think I'm designing models more carefully, I'm designing better experiments, I'm finding new, creative, and useful ways to analyze outputs, and it's potentially easier to prepare communicative reports.

If you're curious, I've blogged about it a couple of times in the past.
See
http://www.facilitatedsystems.com/weblo ... mcsim.html
and the links off that page.


>> 3. Some people say good SD is hard, but then programming and
>> designing

Have you seen Druid (http://druid.sourceforge.net/)?


>> 4. The returns from process improvements and usage of even simple

""The Joy of Thinking Small"" made it into the top 10 list of my blog (http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/20 ... -2006.html).

Bill
- --
Bill Harris
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
Posted by Bill Harris <bill_harris@facilitatedsystems.com>
posting date Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:03:34 -0800 _______________________________________________
Tom Forest <tforest@promethea
Junior Member
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 3:39 am

QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by Tom Forest <tforest@promethea »

Posted by Tom Forest <tforest@prometheal.com>

Jim Hines related an interesting anecdote about growing like weeds.
Ecologically, weeds are fast-growing plants that take advantage of disturbances like fires and floods to propagate widely, inadvertently creating a more hospitable environment for slower growing but longer-lived species. In a weedy environment, a few species predominate. There is much more diversity in the longer-lived species. In a forest, though, only a few will be large and pervasive like canopy trees. I sometimes wonder why SD continues to exist at all, as obscure and little-known as it is. But while it is clearly not a weed, it is just as clearly not a canopy tree.

Let me take up Chander Chawla's challenge, gleaning information for my analysis from the discussion to date.

-- Problem statement: the perceived level of SD use for governmental decisions is far below the level desired by SD practitioners.
-- Reference mode: slow growth to a low level of use--perhaps still slowly growing (in absolute numbers), perhaps plateaued or even declining (in relative terms).

Several people have discussed their perceptions of the level of use. The questions seems to be whether it is significantly higher than what we see, and if so how could we improve our knowledge. As a volunteer consultant on this project, I recommend that we defer addressing this question to Phase II of the project. But let me point out that the membership of the society has two different membership modes. One is the relatively long-term members with primarily academic and methodological interest. The other mode is relatively short-term members whose expertise is elsewhere but wish to glean enough about SD methods to help them in their area of expertise. Hence there is likely to be a much larger number of lapsed members (whose primary knowledge domain is not SD) who no longer have regular communications with the society than there are existing members.
Can someone produce an estimate of how many individuals have ever been members of the society? Of course, some of them will no longer be living, but it will give us an upper bound.

A generic market penetration model would be a good starting point. What are the competing methodologies? What factors affect SD's relative attractiveness? What can we in the SD community do to enhance its attractiveness? How long is the sales cycle? What level of effort is required? What are the latencies in bringing that effort to bear? The key leverage point will be this: how should our effort as a society be allocated between selling directly, adding more sales staff, or improving SD's attractiveness, or some combination thereof? Put another way, how should we budget between sales, recruiting/training, and product development? The classic SD answer is that all need to be done in a coordinated way or there will be a bottleneck generating oscillatory boom-bust behavior with periods depending on the time constants of the three requirements for growth but likely to be some product of them.

The next step I would take in a real consulting engagement would be to build a consensus on what the competition is, what the salient attributes of attractiveness are, how quickly and by what means they could be changed, etc... for all the levels and rates. Then I would run some experiments with different allocation choices among the three promotional activities. Of course, since SDS is a voluntary association of dues-paying members, actually implementing any recommendations we came up with would be yet another challenge. We all do whichever of those three activities we have interest in and availability for. Might I propose a Governmental SIG for those interested? Might I also propose an active policy to slow the turnover of members whose primary knowledge domain is not SD, especially (for the purpose of this problem) governmental employees?

In Phase II we could address the limitations of our perceptions and try to generate policy recommendations for enhancing those perceptions. If we were successful in implementing those policies, it might turn out that our perceived level of use meets or exceeds our desired level. In that case the recommendations from Phase I need not be implemented. My professional opinion, however, is that even with perfect knowledge we would find that the actual level is well below the desired level so that after all this work we'd still have to implement our Phase I recommendations.

Finally, as many on this list have said over the years, as long as we sell SD we fail. When we sell solutions to others' problems we succeed.

Tom Lum Forest
Forest Grove, Oregon
Posted by Tom Forest <tforest@prometheal.com> posting date Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:34:17 -0800 _______________________________________________
""Erling Moxnes"" <Erling.Mox
Junior Member
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 3:39 am

QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Erling Moxnes"" <Erling.Mox »

Posted by ""Erling Moxnes"" <Erling.Moxnes@geog.uib.no>

A few reflections on SD growth and impact.

Starting with Jay Forrester and having 1000 society members after 50 years, implies a growth rate of 15 percent per year. If that continues there will be 1 million members in another 50 years. With 50 percent attendance at the conferences, we will need much space for the plenary sessions!

Forecasts like this one, as well as the more pessimistic ones, suffer from a typical bias towards hard data. More important for me is the enthusiasm I felt when first learning SD, as well as the enthusiasm I see among our students and clients. In this lies a lasting potential for growth and impact.

A growing number of experimental studies demonstrate the complexity of even small dynamic models. Many ""elevator speech"" instructions fail to improve the results. Changing people's existing mental models is hard, particularly when one has to start from scratch every time. This is why I think Forrester's call for K12 education in SD is very important. Much work is needed to succeed; we have just started.

Since dynamics are complex, I also think we should strive for simplicity and clarity in models and presentations. I see more happy faces and more enthusiasm when teaching simple cases rather than complex ones. Most system dynamicists seem to underestimate the complexity of their work. Every year I show the new students a moderately comprehensive causal loop diagram from one of our conferences. I give them 2 minutes to count the feedback loops.
The answers are approximately uniformly distributed from 1 to 6! Who ever gave the audience a 2 minute break to figure out the number of loops in their CLD? Sometimes one needs to complicate models for research purposes and to answer questions from clients. However, to make major points and to change faulty mental models do you ever need more than two or three stocks??

Whishing you all a happy and simple new year,

Erling Moxnes

----------------------
Erling Moxnes
System Dynamics Group
Dept. of Geography
University of Bergen
Posted by ""Erling Moxnes"" <Erling.Moxnes@geog.uib.no> posting date Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:38:11 +0100 _______________________________________________
""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@
Junior Member
Posts: 11
Joined: Fri Mar 29, 2002 3:39 am

QUERY SD Impact on National Government Policies

Post by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@ »

Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu>

Even one stock may be sufficient to make a point, and we know many bright people can't figure out if the bathtub is going to fill or empty with competing inflow and outflow.

But, if we apply that level thinking to the SD field itself, it draws attention not just to the enthusiasm that starting students and clients have (as Erling Moxnes points out), but to the dampening and outflow effects that often follow shortly thereafter, with a larger time-frame boundary.

In some evangelical organizations I've looked at, the growth rate is actually almost completely dominated by the rate of people falling away from the faith,
which makes that look like an interesting candidate intervention point. What is it,
in particular, that changes loose individuals with enthusiasm for a new love or realization into a knit-fabric that can bear up under the soon-to-arrive wet-blanket
effects? How does one sustain the energy that many-coals-interacting have and
that scientific edge (as in ""cavity radiation"") and prevent the coals, once separated, from going out? This is a problem that many of us have insight regarding.

The key factor that is emphasized in Public Health, particularly ""Health Education"", which is to say, ""lifestyle change"", is that the appropriate unit of change cannot be ""one person""
but really needs to be ""one small group of people."" This is supported by many studies.
The Institute of Medicine's ""Crossing the Quality Chasm"" focuses attention for those who would change healthcare systems on ""the microsystem"", that is, the small-team of 5-20 people who deliver care together - because trying to change individuals doesn't actually seem to work very well, and larger systems are too big to change.

Small groups are startlingly effective for many psychosocial reasons. For example, it's more effective to pay a woman's children $10 for every kilogram she loses than to pay
her.

The Institute for Health Care Improvement has developed an entire ""Collaborative"" model where the trend-leaders get together, catch the fire together, then go back to their home institutions, where the fire tends to go out, but the leaders have already formed interactive bonding, and have several more repeat meetings together to deal with all their home wet blankets together. That seems to be fairly effective.

So, I'd pose the question to this list: does that sort of effect happen with regards to
system dynamics too? And, assuming it does, has that been taken into account in
designing fire-passing interventions?

The key thing here is that, if we want the number of individuals to grow, and the usage of the tools to grow, then it is important (by this model) that the interactive FIELD grow at the
same time. This argues that, due to far less post-excitement declcine, training a group of 10
people may be far more effective than training 10 individuals, in the long run.

Jim Porto at UNC will be having a training session for faculty of schools of public health in the new ""core competency"" for MPH students of ""systems thinking"" in early February. That should help get a whole new cadre of policy advocates started. But, from looking around this summer at Johns Hopkins, they will tend to go home to legacy-trained biomedical epidemiologists, etc., who will heatedly attack what will be perceived as ""soft headed"" squisy thinking because, obviously, bleeding kills people, not bullets or people with guns or ""angry people with guns"" or ""poverty that leads to angry people with guns"", or ""US social policy that leads to poverty that leads to anger that leads to terrorism that leads to guns that leads to bleeding."" At Hopkins the ratio of biomedical epidemiologists to distal-causality epidemiologists is
approximately 70 to 2 the wrong direction. And even if you want to publish, who is going to review the work
who is sympathetic? It's a long haul problem, and opposed with almost religious zeal to stomp out ""sloppy thinking"", which is how it is perceived, way too close for comfort to ""God made it happen"" which they've almost finally stomped out. As Norm Anderson at NIH OBSSR found out, the audience is not ""disinterested"", the audience is actively hostile and perceives system dynamics as ""enemy action.""

Obviously, your field's mileage may vary. My point is not to dwell on public health, although that's an important field for policy and governmental action in many key areas, but to suggest that a stronger strategy is to increase the size of the working unit to be taught as one and to remain together after teaching above one person. The continuing connectivity and social warmth is a crucial factor to fight off the wet blankets and increase our stock of people who think globally.

At least, it seems like a great avenue to explore to me.

Wade

Wade Schuette, MBA
MPH student at Johns Hopkins
and otherwise Senior Systems Analyst
University of Michigan Health System
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu> posting date Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:12:55 -0500 _______________________________________________
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