QUERY Future Development Directions

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John Sterman <jsterman@MIT.ED
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by John Sterman <jsterman@MIT.ED »

Posted by John Sterman <jsterman@MIT.EDU>

I cannot accept the idea that modelers, consultants or advisors are responsible only for helping their client make better decisions regardless of the morality of those decisions or the purpose for which their advice will be used. We all have an ethical responsibility to provide the best advice we can and to use the scientific method with integrity to ground our work. We also have a responsibility to work only on projects we judge to be morally acceptable and to shun those that are not. To take an extreme conditions test, it would have been immoral to help Eichmann improve the efficiency of Auschwitz.

I am not suggesting that anyone posting to this list would have helped the Nazis. Many of the decisions we face are much less clear. But we must all actively consider the moral implications of what we do, professionally as well as personally. We are people first and have a responsibility to act ethically in everything we do.

John Sterman
Posted by John Sterman <jsterman@MIT.EDU> posting date Fri, 16 Feb 2007 07:26:19 -0500 _______________________________________________
Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom. »

Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se>

Obviously there are senior managers who operate in their own self-interest.

Fortunately there are enough of the others, who could be our potential clients. I have consulted to upper management for 19 years and have yet to come across anybody with dubious morals.

Neither have I met anybody who is stupid or ignorant. All of them have been plain busy trying to do a good job. Hoards of staff, customers, suppliers and consultants are constantly tugging their sleeves and trying to get their attention. Virtually all of them are suffering from attention overload. Of course this is partially their own doing as they got to where they are buying solving problems and pursuing opportunities.

Most of them have several consultants or academics approaching them every week. We in the sd community are just part of that incessant background noise trying to get through. They do not see why they should talk to yet another consultant or academic with the panacea for all.

If we are not getting through we cannot blame them. The onus is on us to showcase breakthrough thinking and how our methodology cuts through ""the fog of war"".

I have attended two sd-conferences. I think there is an interesting mix of academics, practitioners and consultants. I have found it most rewarding to attend. But maybe we should allow sessions where we cast aside the academic rigor in order to showcase good presentations of real world problems.

Paul Holmstrom
Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se> posting date Sat, 17 Feb 2007 13:13:30 +0100 _______________________________________________
Richard Stevenson <rstevenson
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson »

Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com>

John Sterman writes ""I cannot accept the idea that modelers, consultants or advisors are responsible only for helping their client make better decisions regardless of the morality of those decisions or the purpose for which their advice will be used.""

Maybe I missed it - but I don't recall that anybody in this thread has suggested any such thing!

Paul Holmström, rather more positively, writes ""I have consulted to upper management for 19 years and have yet to come across anybody with dubious morals.""

Further, Paul says ""If we are not getting through we cannot blame them. The onus is on us to showcase breakthrough thinking and how our methodology cuts through ""the fog of war"".""

Quite. We will not progress in the business arena by wringing hands about managers' morals or their personal interests. Managers in the nuclear power industry are not morally inferior to managers in health care - although you may, of course, decline to work in nuclear (or indeed health) if you choose. We must all make value judgements about what we want to do.

In most real business cases that any of us will ever engage in, managers are genuinely trying to make difficult decisions in trying circumstances - the fog of war.

The fact is that business regulation IS getting extremely tough and that managers are increasingly under scrutiny to deliver value to all their stakeholders. In my country (UK) the burden of ""corporate governance"" (i.e scrutiny of directors) covers a vast range of laws - employment, health and safety, environment, finance - I could go on and on. I don't think it's that different in the US and Europe.

The role of the modern Board is to balance the interests of their
shareholders against all these other interests and stakeholders.
Often, directors are very well rewarded for doing so - that doesn't make them immoral, nor irrational.

Against this background of ever increasing regulation, system dynamics is, perhaps uniquely, now well positioned to help managers to balance their decisions - over time. My purpose in starting this thread was to make just that point.

But SD will do itself no favours whatsoever by adopting a high moral tone that is narrowly dismissive of business managers and management decision-making. Such comments are in my opinion ill-informed and, I think, perhaps indicative of the cause of SD's lack of progress in business in fifty years.

Richard Stevenson
Valculus Ltd
Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com> posting date Sat, 17 Feb 2007 14:16:52 +0000 _______________________________________________
""Jim Thompson"" <james.thomp
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by ""Jim Thompson"" <james.thomp »

Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <james.thompson@strath.ac.uk>

Paul Holmström suggests that the International System Dynamics Conference should allow sessions where we cast aside the academic rigor in order to showcase good presentations of real world problems.

While I agree with Paul that practice-based presentations have been in short supply, nothing in the Conference set-up prevents practitioners from presenting their work. In Nijmegen, for example, there were several sessions that highlighted practice-based work.

It may be a matter of notice. Perhaps the Conference organizers could develop a 'practitioner thread' that highlights the Business Roundtable and sessions in which at least one presenter is an independent consultant or in-house system dynamicist.

There are always more papers submitted than the Conference can accommodate.
That's a very healthy problem. But practitioners are encouraged to take a little time and write up their interesting applications. Papers about applied system dynamics do not have to meet a 'contribution to the field'
standard and, from plenary to poster, an enthusiastic audience awaits good work.

Jim Thompson
Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <james.thompson@strath.ac.uk> posting date Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:23:27 -0500 _______________________________________________
Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@we
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@we »

Posted by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@web.de>

Following the discussion from the beginning I would like to give my comments on it.

I can fully understand that everybody capable of forming models in SD wants to present a complete model of a model that is present in current business life. But as coming from the more practical side of life, meaning being involved in frontline processes also having visions of a broader picture concerning the dependencies of the various processes in a company I see some shortcoming of the discussion so far.

The people that have to be reached by SD thinkers are the top management (giving the direction of future steps) and middle management (putting the direction into real results). We have to solve their problems!

The question is: what is/are their problem/s?

At the current time company problems can be easily shifted elsewhere (shifting the burden!) in the world mostly looking on the labour costs. This is not equivalent with erasing the problem (such as making processes lean or -generally saying- better) but this just leads to another few years of profit until every competitor is doing the same thing and the processes are everywhere the same again (I am generalising a bit;-)) and then there is another change to an even cheaper country.

So I think management has to realize that problems just don't fade away when they move the factory to a cheaper part of the world.

Here should SD (and of course in more general terms System Thinking) come into action. I think it is not the perfect model that is useful to change minds but the general view and the various possibilities of steps and their impact on other processes in businesses (either positive or negative). As soon as the interest of the management is grabbed then thoughts about particular models should be discussed in taken to action. Presentations to top management should not exceed an
A3 page (similar to the A3-story at Toyota), so the situation can be grasped and discussed right on this ONE page.

The next question is: where can I get in contact with management?

This could be either through the SDS Conference where sometimes practitioners step in (happened to me last year in Nijmegen when I joined the Business SIG by chance:-)), then there are conferences on other topics such as TPM Total Productive Maintenance, where SD thinkers could step in evaluating what the burning questions of business are. Of course the attendance of that kind of conference has at first sight a more indirect connection between SD and business topics. I am sure it will turn in no time that there are strong connections between the fields. Having a good example of that right at the company where I work, namely the plant manager himself who is lecturing about ""Systemic Factory Planning"" at the Technical University of Dresden bringing students (they are studying mechanical engineering) the connectiveness of processes concerning the broader environment of the company closer to mind. These students will be the managers of tomorrow understanding SD and ST;-)

> Paul Holmström suggests that the International System Dynamics
> Conference should allow sessions where we cast aside the academic
> rigor in order to showcase good presentations of real world problems.


That is a great proposal:-) Especially smaller but pressing problems in the business world should be addressed.

> It may be a matter of notice. Perhaps the Conference organizers could
> develop a 'practitioner thread' that highlights the Business
> Roundtable and

This kind of presentation would be perfectly suitable for the Business SIG of the SDS, that also has a Yahoo discussion group
(http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/sdsbizsig/) right on this field.
Till now the number of people discussing the topic there are not yet above the ""critical mass"" and some people, such as myself, are relatively new to the field unfamilar with modelling.

So I am looking forward to further fruitful discussion on the above topic.

So long

Ralf

PS.: Of course the busines view is just a glimpse of the complete SD view that is much wider;-) Posted by Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold@web.de> posting date Sun, 18 Feb 2007 17:47:25 +0100 _______________________________________________
""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasys
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QUERY Future Development Directions

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

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

A couple of people have mentioned practice-based presentations at our annual conference. Here's a more radical thought:

Why not have a ""professional conference"" that's separate from the existing conference?

A few years ago, Roberta Spencer and I attended a professional conference on supply chains. It was VERY different from an academic conference; it was very different from our annual SD conference. Consultants were giving talks that -- in addition to providing practical advice -- also plugged their services. There was no implication in the talks that what was being presented was new or groundbreaking. The focus was simply, 'here's what we do'.

I came away from the conference on supply chains thinking there really wouldn't be a lot of synergy between the sort of conference we usually have, and a professional SD conference. In fact, if anything the reverse: The agenda and mind set of one sort of conference would interfere with the agenda and mindset of the other sort.

Through the years there have been several attempts to make the annual SD conference more attractive to professionals. None have succeeded as fully as we'd hoped. Maybe the reason is that a professional focus really doesn't complement an academic focus, but instead detracts from it.

My guess is that a separate professional conference would provide the needed space for a flowering of professional presentations and discussion, and would attract many, many more practitioners than our current conference does. Further, I suspect that a separate professional conference, would actually **improve** the current (academic) conference -- meaning the average quality of the papers and conversation at the academic conference would improve in ways that most people at that conference would like.

Why not have a separate professional conference?

Jim
Posted by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasystems.com> posting date Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:19:40 -0500 _______________________________________________
""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasys
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QUERY Future Development Directions

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

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

A couple of people have mentioned practice-based presentations at our annual conference. Here's a more radical thought:

Why not have a ""professional conference"" that's separate from the existing conference?

A few years ago, Roberta Spencer and I attended a professional conference on supply chains. It was VERY different from an academic conference; it was very different from our annual SD conference. Consultants were giving talks that -- in addition to providing practical advice -- also plugged their services. There was no implication in the talks that what was being presented was new or groundbreaking. The focus was simply, 'here's what we do'.

I came away from the conference on supply chains thinking there really wouldn't be a lot of synergy between the sort of conference we usually have, and a professional SD conference. In fact, if anything the reverse: The agenda and mind set of one sort of conference would interfere with the agenda and mindset of the other sort.

Through the years there have been several attempts to make the annual SD conference more attractive to professionals. None have succeeded as fully as we'd hoped. Maybe the reason is that a professional focus really doesn't complement an academic focus, but instead detracts from it.

My guess is that a separate professional conference would provide the needed space for a flowering of professional presentations and discussion, and would attract many, many more practitioners than our current conference does. Further, I suspect that a separate professional conference, would actually **improve** the current (academic) conference -- meaning the average quality of the papers and conversation at the academic conference would improve in ways that most people at that conference would like.

Why not have a separate professional conference?

Jim
Posted by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasystems.com> posting date Mon, 19 Feb 2007 12:19:40 -0500 _______________________________________________
""Colm Toolan (subs)"" <subsc
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QUERY Future Development Directions

Post by ""Colm Toolan (subs)"" <subsc »

Posted by ""Colm Toolan (subs)"" <subscriptions@toolan.de>

Jim wrote >> Why not have a ""professional conference"" that's separate from the existing conference?

To paraphrase an old anti-war slogan: Suppose we had a professional conference and no one turned up?

About a year ago, I asked on this list for examples of SD in use - commercially or otherwise - with documented returns on effort and/or investment. Unfortunately the responses citing documented examples were relatively few.

While I agree with Kim that this may simply be due to business people (and their advisors) not wishing to ""open their kimonos"" to talk about the successes they've achieved with SD - with the resultant transparency into the detail of how they run their business - I can't help thinking that the SD community just doesn't have enough good - i.e. properly documented, with RoI etc - examples of SD in use in business to fill (even) a one-day professional conference.


Colm Toolan, Business Architect
Posted by ""Colm Toolan (subs)"" <subscriptions@toolan.de> posting date Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:12:18 +0100 _______________________________________________
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