QUERY The Death of System Dynamics?

[Richard Stevenson <richard@co]

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

Having been engaged with SD since the 1960's - and having run a successful SD consulting business for over 15 years, I now want to question the entire basis of the System Dynamics Society. My company - Cognitus Ltd - sponsored the SDS for several years. But recently the SDS seems to me to have become a self- serving and introspective club that resists change and is entirely blind to new opportunities and problems in the real corporate world.

Astonishingly, after 50 years of SD, the Society can now pride itself on engaging just 400 people at its annual conference! That's just not good enough.

This is, I admit, a challenging statement. I'm not going to back away from it, however. Jay Forrester's original (and exciting!) vision of ""designing organisations"" has been completely lost by the SD community.

The problem with SD today is its lack of business focus and a complete absence of self-discipline. That freedom has given academics a ""right to roam"" and probably stimulated original abstract thinking over the years. But in the real, corporate world, SD's impact has been minimal compared to its potential - and far from getting stronger, in fact it is disappearing.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect is the ""bottom up"" approach that has characterised SD since ""Industrial Dynamics"". Causal loops, archetypes, stocks and flows....all true but managers just don't have the time. It's like saying ""I know you all speak English but I want you to learn Esperanto"". Unfortunately, using Esperanto imperfectly, most managers just tend to talk gibberish to each other.

I am also often astonished by the poor quality of much of what at passes for commentary on the SD forum. There seems to be little or no distinction between crazy student rambling, learned tablets of stone, detailed technical enquiry and
academic philosophical meandering. It's completely random. Who's really in charge?

Posted by Richard Stevenson <richard@cognitus.co.uk> posting date Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:12:15 +0000 _______________________________________________

[""Alan McLucas"" <a.mclucas@a]

Posted by ""Alan McLucas"" <a.mclucas@adfa.edu.au>

At the risk of entering the impending fray like a prize fighter leading with his chin, I declare my support of Richard's criticisms. Before proceeding, let me independently thank Cognitus Ltd for their long time continued sponsorship and support. Cognitus Ltd is a name strongly associated with both the System Dynamics Society and the System Dynamics discipline.

Firstly, we members of the Society should feel uneasy that we have created a situation where such criticisms, indeed, might be justified. Of course, it is essential that discussion of these criticisms limited to this closed forum.

Secondly, it remains a serious concern (as I see it) that despite so much having been written about feedback systems thinking and system dynamics (SD, for brevity) that SD has struggled to achieve the strong influence over strategy and policy formulation, and decision making that we enthusiastic SD proponents might expect. Richard's point that SD, its tools and techniques are just too much trouble for most managers is unfortunately too true. We often distance ourselves from our organizational clients and the public and I believe we can be fairly criticised for haring off at a tangent, pursuing our own myopic goals. On the positive side, there have been numerous serious attempts to make SD more accessible and understandable. Notable amongst these are Peter Senge's 'The Fifth Discipline', John Sterman's 'Business Dynamics', Kim Warrens work on 'Strategy Dynamics', and the 30-year retrospective on 'Limits to Growth'. But in a global sense the extent of readership, and consequent impacts in terms of changing the public
views have been limited. In a recent Government-initiated public forum on
environmental impact, I was stunned by the collective ignorance the work Jorgen Randers and other ""prominent"" SD researchers, and of SD itself. To engage clients (and the public) in a dialogue based upon a rigorous understanding of SD is intellectually demanding. Unfortunately, most people cannot be bothered, if for no other reason than human cognitive capacity is seriously outmatched by real-world complex dynamic problems. It therefore comes as no surprise that in 'Business Dynamics' John Sterman suggests that one should use expert modellers in SD interventions. Unfortunately, not everybody engaging in SD can be experts - we have all been novices at some time. Well meaning but inexperienced or naïve SD modellers can produce incomplete, erroneous and misleading advice (and whilst I have considerable anecdotal evidence for this effect, to pursue this in any detail would be a distraction). None of us can claim to have been right on every occasion, and it is unfortunate that we cannot always agree amongst ourselves.
Further, I suspect that there have been too many occasions when we have inadvertently given untimely or inappropriate advice or our clients have not been able to interpret what we have told them - and we have to take full responsibility for the latter. Rouwette, et al in their 1999 study of group model building projects found that the most problematic of nine areas of investigated was in development of a 'common language'. Within the Society we must strive to achieve a common language and highly effective ways of engaging both our clients and the public, thereby improving the credibility of SD. We must seek to understand what we can do to dramatically improve the acceptance and implementation of SD-based strategies.

Thirdly, exemplary practice in SD and the self discipline needed to produce it are not always evident (most unfortunately). Having reviewed many conference papers and seen the products for which (some) consultants have been paid, I have been appalled by instances of poor quality and lack of rigour. This is most evident in research papers which have been subsequently presented, relatively unchanged, despite receiving adverse reviews. The Society has a duty to improve this aspect. Here I must stress that I believe that the majority of SD researchers, practitioners, consultants, teachers and students do excellent work. The greatest contributions to the credibility of SD come from those exemplary practices which come under public scrutiny. So it is that threats to credibility arise from examples of poor practice. Unfortunately, the latter are remembered longest. We have a duty to be disciplined and strive continually to achieve exemplary practice.

Fourthly, the SD discipline appears to be forging ahead oblivious to hard-won knowledge of other systems disciplines. In systems engineering the need for top-down design and bottom-up construction is widely accepted, and for very good reasons. Optimisation of sub-systems does not lead to system-level optimisation, and sub-systems cannot be considered in total isolation. We have forgotten how strongly the formative years of SD were influenced by these principles. Whilst these principles are strongly embedded in control theory and electrical engineering, and SD is founded (in part, at least) upon them, their significance appears to be unknown to many SD modellers. Jay Forrester makes the point the systemic problems we address through use of SD can be significantly more complex in terms of order and number of feedback loops than those which engineers face.
Consequently, our work is potentially more difficult. We need to strive harder to develop our collective knowledge whilst never forgetting that SD derives its strength from a solid understanding of systems principles.

Regards,
Alan


Dr Alan McLucas
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, UNSW@ADFA, Australian Defence Force Academy, Northcott Drive, CAMBPELL ACT 2600 AUSTRALIA Posted by ""Alan McLucas"" <a.mclucas@adfa.edu.au> posting date Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:26:54 +1000 _______________________________________________

[Bill Braun <bbraun@hlthsys.co]

Posted by Bill Braun <bbraun@hlthsys.com>

Richard Stevenson wants to know who is in charge of SD.

I ask, who is in charge of any discipline? Broadly stated, I would say that the thought leaders are in charge.

I interpret Richard's comments to suggest that original visions are immutable. I too read and reread Dr. Forrester's seminal works, and after numerous readings, still come away inspired and rejuvenated. Does that mean there is nothing after his thinking?

If SD is to be measured by its business orientation, I fear whatever toehold it has will shrink. At ISDC 2005 I attended the session on SD in education with Peter Senge and friends, and sat behind Dr. Forrester, who, from his comments, did not have a lot of business on his mind at the time. Is there a connection between education and business? Of course.
That said, he seemed to be keenly interested in how we educate, which taken at face value, is not business.

I appreciate Richard's sentiment, but I am not sure he is on target with his narrow metric of conferee participants. Nor am I convinced that the ""right to roam"" is the death knell of SD. I paged through past issues of the SDR and the scholarship and the concrete reality of a cross section of papers seemed pretty earth-bound to me.

I did connect with Richard's metaphor of English and Esperanto; the vast majority of managers are for the most part incurious and largely undereducated (including those with MBAs) and matching the vocabulary to the audience may turn out to be a high leverage shift.

Bill Braun
Posted by Bill Braun <bbraun@hlthsys.com> posting date Tue, 23 Jan 2007 07:08:48 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Dan Proctor"" <jproctor@gis]

Posted by ""Dan Proctor"" <jproctor@gis.net>

I suppose one can condense Cognitus' comments down to:

""I increase profits, therefore I am.""

Dan Proctor
Posted by ""Dan Proctor"" <jproctor@gis.net> posting date Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:31:17 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@]

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

Richard -
Can you share your vision for where you see the SD group going, and how?
Would a SD working professional sub-group meet your needs?

Anyone -
Is the listserver mail archived somewhere searchable?
[ it is at http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum/ ]
Is there a SDS wiki where threads are disentangled and subjects
like SDS future directions are being slowly fleshed out with
hard data and extended discussions?
[ this is on the todo list for the new society website ]

Wade Schuette, MBA
Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu> posting date Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:53:40 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sp]

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>

At the risk of leading with my chin, I must say that I am both in violent agreement and in violent disagreement with what Richard Stevenson and Alan McLucas write.

VIOLENT AGREEMENT: To grow, our discipline must have discipline. It is the necessary next phase of our growth cycle -- where the first phase is pretty chaotic (attempting, via ""academic philosophical meandering"" and other means, to find ""what works""), the second phase needs to be one of standardization and refinement (""doing what works better and better."") This second phase derives its excitement from our exponentially increasing success rather than from fresh discovery and creating something from nothing. The problem oh so typically is that people tend to get addicted to what worked in an earlier phase and have difficulty making the phase change needed to continue growth. And perhaps it is unreasonable to expect people who have a lifetime invested in the skills needed in an earlier phase to give up what has led to their self fulfillment and start over, learning a new set of skills and applying them to go forward. So those of us who have gotten us this far need, not to step aside (far from it), to encourage those with the new skill sets to carry us all forward. We need to provide the grounding, and the reminders needed from time to time, to the next generation -- we need to be the ""keepers of the tradition"" who fully understand what it is we discovered that really ""worked"" and help the next generation refine and improve it and not stray too far from the path. Some of us may even be able to learn and change enough to actually contribute to the refinement and standardization, but not everyone should feel that they must make this effort.

VIOLENT DISAGREEMENT: I don't think it is going to be the expert modelers presenting fully developed models who influence society (business, government, education, etc.) to adopt a systems approach. I think we have a more effective, proven method right in front of us. We need look no further than to what Dana Meadows did so well (and damn the fates for taking her from us too soon!) For 15 years she wrote a weekly column that applied SD concepts to concerns that affected her readers. She focused on sustainability issues and I believe her impact is felt throughout that community today. It is difficult for people researching sustainability to ignore SD (though, of course, some still do). I think some other brilliant ""expert modelers"" could do a similar service in other areas -- the politics of war, the growth or decline of western society in the face of Asian ascendancy, the consequences of the overuse of fossil fuels, causes and effects of global warming. Whatever is in the headlines today could benefit from a systems analysis -- and while I do believe it requires that people with experience and expertise in modeling provide guidance, I don't believe it requires that we create a detailed simulation model to generate insights that will not be misleading.

John Gunkler

For those who have forgotten what a voice Dana Meadows was, here is a small excerpt that seems particularly apt:

""Just imagine what might have happened if the improvements in energy efficiency the world has actually made in the past ten years -- the smaller cars, better insulation, sensibly-planned industrial plants, energy-saving appliances -- had come to pass twenty years earlier:

- The U.S. and Europe would not have been heavy oil importers in 1973, and OPEC would not have had the market leverage to increase prices so suddenly and greatly.

- There would not have been an enormous transfer of wealth to the Middle East. The Mideast arms race and its spillover into terrorism would have been vastly curtailed. The Iran/Iraq war might not have happened, and certainly would not be fought with advanced weapons (such as Exocet missiles) bought with oil profits."" [For the rest, go to http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/ ... 74lovinsed

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> posting date Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:10:09 -0500 _______________________________________________

[Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jac]

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

Hi Richard

Following your remarks that are a bit hard, but sometimes it is necessary if one wants to be heard.

One first remark about the last thread.
All the ideas where very personal and not based on facts.
It seems strange that no one knows really how and why the field is evolving and the result leads to the difficulty of setting clear objectives.

Second remark:
Now is it the fault of the SDS?
What are the official functions of the SDS?
The SDS is an organisation that has all the advantages and the drawbacks of being public.
The advantages and drawbacks is that it federates many people with very different world views and it is difficult to have coherent objectives that satisfies all of them but it permits to have an annual conference with 400 people participating which is a not so bad number.

Third remark:
The field seems to be mostly supported by the academic world.
I think that it is better to be supported by somebody than by no one.
The academic support has the advantage to be less prone to sudden disinterest and offers a stable and protective environment.
The drawback is that its motivation is generally not profit and usefulness oriented and more susceptible to err towards what you name intellectual wandering.
I have personally nothing against intellectual considerations and I think that everybody has the right to choose the way he uses SD.
I must confess that I have participated sometimes to some intellectually oriented threads.
But one of the consequences is for instance that I never so far attended the SD conference while being interested by the subject since 5 years.
I did not want to be an anachronism in a conference that seems not to be oriented towards practical applications but towards research. I am from the business world.

Fourth remark:
About the lack of business focus.
I am a member of the business special interest group and it will take some time until it will reach a sufficient level of activity. I do not know if you are a member, some members being only known by their user names and not having given their real names.
But being interested in the business world and having visited your web site, the business SIG would certainly benefit from an experienced person like you.
The lack of business development seems to me the cause of a lack of private involvement more than a the lack of public one.
When one studies the structure of the private sector directly involved in SD, it appears as being formed by small entities that do not have the means necessary to at the same time adapt the SD methodology to the business market, develop the offer and make sure that the service offered will meet the clients expectations, this last preoccupation being critical.
To my opinion the only possibility for the field to develop its activity in the business world is that one individual or group of individuals find that it is opportune to invest massively in the field in the three directions, product, clients and people to do the job, hoping a return on their investment in the future.
This can happen today or in 10 years as well.
Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé Allocar
Strasbourg France.
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:24:50 +0100 _______________________________________________

[Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jac]

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

Hi John

About your agreement, you say that we must be disciplined.
I agree with you that SD as a methodology needs a very high level of discipline.
Unfortunately until somebody entering the profession knows what sort of discipline is required, will take several years.
He will learn to be disciplined by experience and after having made a lot of bad models.

I then think that one must help people to be disciplined.
Actually the profession is going to much towards adding more power to the tools than making them easier to use. SD for me is a powerful technique that needs year of practice to be mastered. The problem is not adding more power but adding more control.
Control on how the problem to be modelled is chosen so that it matches the resources needed (time, money, expertise), if it is or not susceptible to profit from the SD methodology, if the stake is high enough to justify the amount of resources involved.
The control must be kept from the beginning of the definition up to the end of the study.
It must help the modeller avoid the following traps (not precise enough definition, setting bad boundaries, bad horizon, bad time step, bad level of aggregation, and most important finishing with a too complex model, difficult to analyze).
The control must permit to keep the level of complexity sufficient low, or help analyze complex models (loops dominance etc.) and help simplify models (suppress not useful material).
So the profession should change its goals if it wants more people using SD.

About the possibility to change one method against another, I think that if people find that it can help them, they are ready to make a lot of efforts.
The competition in the business world is so hard, that anything that may give a competitive advantage will be used, at the condition that the competitive advantage is proven and available.

About the disagreement:
There are truly a lot of subjects to be studied at the condition that the method does not focus on why things are supposed to have happened in the past but proposes credible policies for the future.
Is SD represented at Davos? What could the profession show?
The last world model that has thousands of feed back loops?
The model is easy to use, but the problem is that it requires a blind belief in its reliability.
Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé Allocar
Strasbourg France
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:55:01 +0100 _______________________________________________

[""Colin Beveridge"" <colin@co]

Posted by ""Colin Beveridge"" <colin@colin.beveridge.name>

Recent threads (SD in government, adoption dynamics and the death of SD) show that there is a dialogue to be had within the Society and beyond. I still feel that this could be worth a workshop, or lunch meeting at SDS07.

In the meantime, I have now tidied up my own thoughts about organisational adoption and put them forward for those who may be interested at http://www.colin.beveridge.name/colinb- ... namics.pdf I hope to get this diagram written up soon, let me know off-list if you would like a copy.

I believe, if we really wish to move the agenda forward, we need to apply some of our own thinking and diagramming skills to the ""problem"" of SD permeation.

Colin Beveridge
Posted by ""Colin Beveridge"" <colin@colin.beveridge.name> posting date Thu, 25 Jan 2007 15:26:14 -0000 _______________________________________________

[Tom Forest <tforest@promethea]

Posted by Tom Forest <tforest@prometheal.com>

John Gunkler writes:

""Whatever is in the headlines today could benefit from a systems analysis""

Now that's an inspirational challenge, and something to aspire to! On a related topic, I was going through some old files and found a couple of MIT papers from 1984: ""Introduction to the System Dynamics National Model Structure"" (D-3573) and ""Preliminary Proposal for Continuation of The Program on the System Dynamics National Model"" (D-3636). Has anyone written (or drafted or proposed) a book based on the National Model that might be published for general readership, or at the very least done a retrospective for the SD community on what worked and what didn't work either generally or for the popularization of the model?

Tom Lum Forest
Forest Grove, Oregon
Posted by Tom Forest <tforest@prometheal.com> posting date Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:58:13 -0800 _______________________________________________

[""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforest]

Posted by ""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforestr@MIT.EDU>

I am working on a book that will perhaps have the title, ""A General Theory of Economic Behavior,"" that will cover the essence of what has appeared in the papers below and other papers from that same project.
It will be slow going for the next six months because we are in the process of moving, from the house we have occupied for 55 years to a nearby apartment that is under construction, with many details to be done in the short term.

I agree with the challenge below that the headlines, if not of transient events, should be inspirations for system dynamics books addressed to the public. The big issues are no harder to deal with than the little ones,
and represent a much more rewarding Payoff/effort ratio. They are in
reach of individual authors without financial sponsorship. Sponsorship can inhibit the freedom to expose the important, but unpopular, policies that should be brought to public notice.


>""Whatever is in the headlines today could benefit from a systems analysis""

>MIT papers from 1984: ""Introduction to the System Dynamics National
>Model Structure"" (D-3573) and ""Preliminary Proposal for Continuation of
>The Program on the System Dynamics National Model"" (D-3636).

Jay W. Forrester
Professor of Management
Sloan School
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room E60-156
Cambridge, MA 02139
Posted by ""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforestr@MIT.EDU> posting date Sat, 27 Jan 2007 13:49:16 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@]

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


Without excluding other excellent avenues, I second the general thought of John Gunkler that ""expert modelers presenting fully developed models"" are not the only way to influence policy.

In my own experience, complex artifacts that follow long meetings are meaningful only to the participants and almost useless to convey information to those who weren't present and participating in the creation of the
understanding reflected in the artifacts. No one has time or ability to do
a ""cold start.""

Others have presented eloquent arguments focusing on the creation process itself, on SD-guided discussions with a wide diversity of participants to tease out, simultaneously, understanding, information, buy-in, and ownership
of the resulting shared vision. In fact, separating these tasks into isolated
development of a rigorous model seems to be followed often with unsuccessful and awkward attempts to ""sell"" the results to stakeholders and policy-executives,
making the entire experience ineffective. The operating point is ""optimized""
to get the rigor in, which, unfortunately, leaves the managers, executives, and the public out.

I hear comments from business leaders of this nature: ""Never trust a complex model.""

So, I'd suggest that higher total impact would be achieved by focusing more
attention on this first step, the ""power-white-board"", the initial
meetings in which emotion, politics, data, and ideas are slowly teased out and focused into a problem representation and simultaneous social transformational residue of agreement with each other (and somewhat with the
model.) The fact that the representation may be ""executable"" is almost a bonus.
As with any statistical analysis, less complex and less-complete models may be far more credible than ""more accurate"" models with multiple adjusments to the data that just seem like ""cooking the data"" to some.

In that sense, I fear the academic and expert community long ago overshot the ""sweet spot"" and the simplest model that seems ""complete"" to them is already far beyond the complexity that can be considered by the average person. In fact, to the average politician, a simplistic model that comes with community buy-in and an acceptable political compromise would be far more acceptable than a ""good""
model that half the community could not understand and rejected out of hand.
The perfect is enemy of the good.

In the case of SD, we have the ""good"" being enemy of ""the acceptable."" That's
the ""sweet spot"" that needs to be lubricated with tools and facilitators, it seems
to me, to get the camel's nose into the tent in the first place.

Along that axis, the right question is - can we moved this room full of people to any model of complexity level X or less that can represent this situation with
maximum social buy-in for this audience? I recognize that this can be viewed as
an alarming compromise, or ethical cop-out, but I suggest it's a realistic recognition of one actual problem domain which is extremely non-academic in nature and has very different ground rules and value systems.

Along those lines, I share an observation made by Gary Olson, a professor of ""technology- mediated collaboration"" here at the University of Michigan's School of Information.
He noted that many, if not most, of the policy-making meetings he attended never once touched a white-board, and some lacked an agenda or subsequent minutes.

The failure point, in other words, is way further back than refined system-identification techniques, back in the area where people, even academics, ever learned (or didn't learn) how to sit together in a room and draw on the entire room's expertise and generate collective wisdom. So, to some extent, in this metaphor, we're trying to teach advanced physics to a room full of people who flunked algebra and aren't very confident of the whole idea of addition.

For K-12 students, remediation can be addressed. For existing policy-makers and in-service education, I fear that what we really need is a ""SD-LITE"" stripped down tool, stripped down even more than Vensim, to get people used to thinking ""this way"" at all.

For other audiences that do have the trust or the background, proceed as you were, of course.

Wade Schuette, MBA
Posted by ""Schuette, Wade"" <wschuett@jhsph.edu> posting date Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:42:00 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Clark.Lawrence"" <Lawrence.]

Posted by ""Clark.Lawrence"" <Lawrence.Clark@mtmc.org>

I was wondering for the possible access to the articles Jay Forrester mentions at the end of his e message. Thanks!

[ All of the D-Memo's are available on the MIT Literature collection DVD
see http://www.systemdynamics.org/MITCollectionDVDinfo.htm for info.
This is an invaluable collection of material starting from the very
earliest days in the field . ]

Lawrence D. Clark
Posted by ""Clark.Lawrence"" <Lawrence.Clark@mtmc.org> posting date Tue, 30 Jan 2007 08:23:24 -0600 _______________________________________________

[""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sp]

Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>

I have had some success using the ""story telling"" feature built into the ithink (STELLA) software. This allows you to show a model one small piece at a time and build its logic in front of the audience. I find I must take the time to generate discussion about this logic and make sure everyone is on board with each piece before moving on to the next -- or, at least take the time to become aware of any skepticism about any part of the logic so that it can be returned to later and resolved.

""Story telling"" not only isolates a sub-model from the rest of the model (which is easy to do in other ways), but it also allows you to show stocks and flows one at a time, in an order you choose, to (for example) build up a single causal loop and then show how it connects to other parts of the model.

A related method is to aggregate (""black box"") major sections of the model in your early discussions. Even if the people you're working with have had a hand in building the model, I find this is useful (to them and to me!) I let the audience's curiosity lead me to the decision to open a black box or not later on. If the audience trusts the black box, there's no immediate need to explain why it works. I combine black boxes with story telling when the model is complex enough to warrant this.

Of course, I'm talking about very specific contexts here -- where your aim is to get high-level understanding and generate enthusiasm for appropriate policy changes (directionally).


John Gunkler
Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> posting date Tue, 30 Jan 2007 10:17:55 -0500 _______________________________________________

[George A Simpson <gsimpso4@cs]

Posted by George A Simpson <gsimpso4@csc.com>

My experience supports the points made by Wade Schuette.

I get tremendous buy-in from people who have participated in the development of models, but find difficulty explaining polished models even to key stakeholders.

What works for me is rapid small-group model development. Last week, I created several useful business case models, in a live workshop with domain experts (I had little domain background). The participants were astonished - one commented that they had been looking for a result like that we had achieved in less than an hour for 18 months.

I used myStrategy from StrategyDynamics.com, and I find it to be a superb medium for rapid interactive development. Its ridiculously low price means that I can often get participants to purchase it on the spot.

This is not to deny the role or value of complex models, they just need to be packaged with an appropriate interface so the user is protected from the overwhelming complexity.

..george...

Dr. George Simpson, Principal Consultant, CSC Posted by George A Simpson <gsimpso4@csc.com> posting date Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:49:53 +0000 _______________________________________________

[matzaball50@aol.com Hi Folks]

Posted by matzaball50@aol.com

Hi Folks,
>Posted by George A Simpson <gsimpso4@csc.com>
>>My experience supports the points made by Wade Schuette.
>>I get tremendous buy-in from people who have participated in the
>>development of models, but find difficulty explaining polished models
>>even to key stakeholders.

I believe George has stated the problem folks have with ""accepting"" SD models. To put it another way, a ""finished"" model (Is any model ever really ""finished""?) is _A_ perception, or a collection of perceptions(and not the only viable one)of the problem and its various components and interactions as held and understood in the minds of the folks who actually developed the model.

Others may not perceive the problem in the same way or with the ""same"" components and interactions.
The only answer to this is to involve _ALL_ the people who not only need to develop the model but who also might need to use it. Yes, this can become quite cumbersome at times but I don't think that is the major stumbling block. I think one _BIG_ issue with models in general is that modeling is done for a specific purpose and I believe a a few of the major ""purposes"" of building models is to try and influence others. That is, to sell an idea, or project, or to defend a decision. Another big reason is to try and understand the ""changes"" that might be necessary in structure for an organization to become more efficient or profitable and herein lies the big issue. NONE of the above is conducive to be all inclusive. If your looking to ""influence"" people it would certainly be useful to know _HOW_ you might be able to influence them, but in including them in the ""modeling process"" you would have to reveal your hand to them as well. The same holds for organizational changes that might be necessary.

I don't think anyone is going to step up and say;""yes my job is superfluous and should be eliminated"".

Having a modeler ""interpret"" a problem DIRECTLY from an individual or a group of individuals and developing a useful model for those directly involved is tough and demanding as it is, but when one has to not only interpret but ""imagine"" what someone else MIGHT think or perceive, by modeling what you just think others might be perceiving, the task becomes near impossible to do well.

Besides being inclusive and making sure your client understands the limitations inherent in being non-inclusive there is not much else you can do.

Model building is supposed to help people understand and solve problems. If you can't do that with a model, why bother with it in the first place?

>Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
In reading this post after I just read George's, I think this one puts a nice cap on my thoughts.

>>... This allows you to show a model one small piece at a time and
>>build its logic in front of the audience. I find I must take the time
>>to generate discussion about this logic and make sure everyone is on
>>board with each piece before moving on to the next -- or, at least
>>take the time to become aware of any skepticism about any part of the
>>logic so that it can be returned to later and resolved.

John, I think this is probably the key in getting the necessary ""buy-in"" we all seek.
Of course you can only do this with the folks who have been directly involved in your effort.

>>""Story telling"" not only isolates a sub-model from the rest of the
>>model (which is easy to do in other ways), but it also allows you to
>>show stocks and flows one at a time, in an order you choose, to (for
>>example) build up a single causal loop and then show how it connects
>>to other parts of the model.

I think this brings up another issue that involves ""but-in"" and that is; exactly what are you asking the client(S) to ""buy"" into? A solution or a method?
I'm not so sure you need to explain the method (SD) in order to ""sell"" a solution.

Again, folks want answers to their questions and not much else, and I think too often we tend to drift off into details about modeling methods that the clients could caress about. If a client walks away muttering about having to deal with ""rocket scientists"" you know you have crossed the line.

I think most people want to know what kinds and types of solutions you can come up with and what are the GENERAL kinds of methods that are involved with. I talk about the kinds and types of ""data"" that is needed and the kinds and types of ""answers"" they might expect. I don't go into the details of the SD methodology because I'm not selling the SD methodology. I'm selling my expertise in hopefully helping my clients resolve some issues. In fact, I limit my ""technical"" discussions to generalities involved in computer simulation and that I would be happy to go into the details involved, _AFTER_ the project is over. I limit my discussion to answering any questions they might have about the VALIDITY of the ENTIRE process and, as I said in my previous post, to the importance of the inclusion of all the folks involved in the entire process.

I think your ""story telling"" is an excellent way of ""building"" loops and getting the necessary buy-in. But I also think it important that we keep our minds open for new ways to effectively communicate our ideas to others. The point here is that there is never only one best way. The key of course is tailoring your discussion to your audience and THEIR needs.

>>A related method is to aggregate (""black box"") major sections of the
>>model in your early discussions. Even if the people you're working
>>with have had a hand in building the model, I find this is useful (to
>>them and to me!) I let the audience's curiosity lead me to the
>>decision to open a black box or not later on. If the audience trusts
>>the black box, there's no immediate need to explain why it works. I
>>combine black boxes with story telling when the model is complex enough to warrant this.

Yes, this is another way of handling the issue of dealing with ""method"" vs. ""solutions"" issue.

>Of course, I'm talking about very specific contexts here -- where your
>aim
>>is to get high-level understanding and generate enthusiasm for
>>appropriate policy changes (directionally).

Yes, and those ""policy changes"" will be near impossible to pull off _IF_ the folks who are involved in the actual changes are _NOT_ involved in the modeling that helped determine those very changes

Regards,

Marc
Posted by matzaball50@aol.com
posting date Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:07:56 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Jim Thompson"" <james.thomp]

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

The listserv moderator mentioned the MIT System Dynamics Literature collection DVD. A review of the d-memo collection on DVD by George Richardson, Joel Rahn and me appears in System Dynamics Review, 21:1, 91-94.

As we indicated in our review, the DVD is a wonderful resource for targeted research or just browsing.
Jim Thompson
Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <james.thompson@strath.ac.uk> posting date Thu, 1 Feb 2007 17:57:06 -0500 _______________________________________________

[Tom Fiddaman <tom@ventanasyst]

Posted by Tom Fiddaman <tom@ventanasystems.com>

I'm sympathetic to Richard Stevenson's worries about the field. However, I'm unsure e xactly what his prescription is. ""Get back to roots"" doesn't seem like enough. Was SD growing much faster in the Industrial Dynamics days? Does the spread of systems thinking slow the progress of system dynamics modeling? Does emphasis on business consulting push the right positive loops to accelerate the growth of the field?

> Posted by Richard Stevenson <richard at cognitus.co.uk>
>
> ... recently the SDS seems to me to have become a self- serving and
> introspective club that resists change and is entirely blind to new
> opportunities and problems in the real corporate world.


Maybe SD, like other disciplines, has a lot of inertia, but I'm curious - which changes and opportunities are going unseen? More importantly, how could we direct attention toward them?

> Astonishingly, after 50 years of SD, the Society can now pride itself
> on engaging just 400 people at its annual conference! That's just not good enough.

Three's some data on this in Mike Radzicki's 2006 conference address:
http://www.systemdynamics.org/newslette ... ss2006.pdf
See slides 12 & 13. The Society's doubling time is about 9 years. Mike presents a dynamic hypothesis for field growth (slide 27). I think the key question is, what doubling time could we aspire to, and what loops would help to achieve it? (Given the time it takes to become a good practitioner, I think we might hope for 5 years but not 2.) Also, are the society and the conference good measures of the dissemination of our ideas?

> This is, I admit, a challenging statement. I'm not going to back
> away from it, however. Jay Forrester's original (and exciting!)
> vision of ""designing organisations"" has been completely lost by the SD community.

I don't think the fact that people are working on other problems means that the community has lost Jay's original thought. Many non-intervention activities, such as behavioral experiments, are aimed at understanding pieces of the decision-making system that are absolutely critical to the solution of the biggest problems. They also build bridges to other fields, and thus help to attract new practitioners and spread our ideas.

The organizations in greatest need of redesign are governments. Governments are not easily influenced in a consulting mode. Their agencies frequently can't use the answers to the biggest problems because they have no statutory basis to implement them. To change the government one must change the minds of people and politicians, and that requires nontraditional SD.

I do see a lot of projects that tackle small problems where they could just as easily tackle big ones. There are a lot of models that are simply collections of things changing over time, with little feedback and many exogenous inputs. There are many projects with no clear path to implementation. These are all things we could work on, but they strike me as a nuisance more than a core malady. Many of the changes to the conference format have been directed at such problems.

> The problem with SD today is its lack of business focus and a
> complete absence of self-discipline. That freedom has given
> academics a ""right to roam"" and probably stimulated original abstract
> thinking over the years. But in the real, corporate world, SD's
> impact has been minimal compared to its potential - and far from getting stronger, in fact it is disappearing.

Perhaps this is due to something about the nature of business, not the nature of system dynamics. I don't think we can lay the woes of the SD consulting industry at the door of the Society. Some of those woes may be merely cyclical (the low point for me after the dot.com crash was when someone approached me with an $8,000,000,000 problem and a $5,000 budget). If SD is really failing to thrive in the corporate world, I think we should be looking for the internal explanation - what loop are we missing? Is it something about the personality of people attracted to the field? Are we selling a product (truth) no one wants? Do our projects have a poor risk profile (high cost, low probability of big success)? Have we consulting firms choked off our own supply of talent by stealing too many PhDs from academia?

> Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect is the ""bottom up"" approach that
> has characterised SD since ""Industrial Dynamics"". Causal loops,
> archetypes, stocks and flows....all true but managers just don't have
> the time. It's like saying ""I know you all speak English but I want
> you to learn Esperanto"". Unfortunately, using Esperanto imperfectly, most managers just tend to talk gibberish to each other.

This sounds dangerously close to, ""It's hard and time consuming to teach managers to fish, and most of them are too stupid to bait the hook, so let's just give them fish.""
To the extent that it's true, it may explain why the most successful technologies in management (embedded IT systems) require little thinking. That may be a model to exploit, but I don't think it's one to which SD should aspire.

The problem with the English-Esperanto analogy is that managers are speaking Staticlinearish while living in Nonlineardynamica. Sure, they can muddle through in the short run, but in the long run they'd do better to learn some Nonlineardynamic.
Managers are already speaking gibberish to each other because, no matter how grammatical, their Staticlinearish is not a very expressive language (nine words for ""not my job"", none for ""side effect""). Naturally the best way to learn a language is to use it, so it makes sense to teach Nonlineardynamic using real problems (rather than in the abstract for its own sake), but there's no shortage of real problems.

It's important to remember that not everyone is like us. Martha Miller has run the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory at several gatherings of SD practitioners.
Most of us lie in one corner that represents just 4% of the population, as I recall. It's not really surprising that we need more than one language.

> I am also often astonished by the poor quality of much of what at
> passes for commentary on the SD forum. There seems to be little or no
> distinction between crazy student rambling, learned tablets of stone, detailed technical enquiry and
> academic philosophical meandering. It's completely random. Who's really in charge?

No one is in charge. The same criticism could be leveled at every forum I've ever seen, whether the topic is SD, economics, climate, or photography. I think it reflects on the medium more than the field. However, if you look at the annual totals on the Ventana UK archive of the mailing list, (at http://www.ventanasystems.co.uk/forum/v ... m.php?f=34 )

it does appear that traffic was down in 2006. There's now a lot more competition from more-accessible and attractive media (blogs with RSS feeds and Google Reader, Yahoo groups and other online fora with better threading and monitoring, spam-free Groove messages supplanting email, etc.). There are strong positive feedbacks to quality list participation, so it's easy to imagine blather driving out intelligent conversation, and any exogenous effect of improved competition amplified by participant defections.
Maybe this is a sign that it's time to move this discussion to newer technology. I wouldn't expect it to raise the quality of the average post, but it should make it easier to keep track of and engage in the good ones. Also, I would like to see more student input, not less - the field should be investing in growth, not shutting off the inflow because it's inconvenient in the short term. I see no evidence that student ramblings are more prevalent or crazier than others.

Tom

****************************************************
Tom Fiddaman
Ventana Systems, Inc.
Posted by Tom Fiddaman <tom@ventanasystems.com> posting date Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:42:02 -0700 _______________________________________________

[""Keith Linard"" <klin4960@bi]

Posted by ""Keith Linard"" <klin4960@bigpond.net.au>

I have resisted getting involved in the recent navel gazing, in part because I am busy completing a major SD consulting project and also because the SD discussion seems to cover this ground every 2 or 3 years.

First, harking back to previous gloomy discussion on SD in Government, I have seen dramatic penetration of the fundamental ideas of qualitative systemic thinking at State & Federal levels over the past 30 years in Australia, in large measure kick-started by the 1976 'Club of Rome' report.
Indeed, it was the 4 full pages of the Melbourne 'Herald', then one of Australia's largest circulation tabloids, devoted to the Club of Rome's scenarios that first sparked my interest in SD. In Australia, the 1970's debate between the econometricians and system dynamicists was not confined to obscure journals, but was played out in the tabloid press, political parties and the state and federal parliaments.

Wind forward a decade or so. The Australian federal public service reform program, which I served as Chief Finance Officer, Federal Department of Finance, applied a profoundly systemic approach, actively seeking to identify the positive and negative feedback mechanisms in order to develop policy leverage. From our widespread consultations, only 2 interventions come to mind. The first, a senior public servant, who insisted SD was the answer to our every problem. But fundamentalist evangelists are counter-productive, whether preaching jihad or SD. The other was a government Research Scientist who gave me a Beta version of software called 'Stella', saying ""This will change your world"". Stella-Ithink certainly changed my world, if not the world.

Jumping forward a decade, I was running the SD undergrad & postgrad program at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Over a 14 year period, close on 1000 senior defence or public service personnel (many now at senior executive level) were exposed to SD. I had two hours with a State Minister for Health, his Chief of Staff and senior departmental executives, building a demo model of the dynamics of hospital waiting list issues (thanks Eric Wolstenholme - I plagiarised that). The Minister directed his department to pick up this 'tool'. I did a 2 hour personal briefing to the Chief of the Air Staff, presentations to the Chief of the General Staff, Departmental CEO's, numerous top executive groups in the public service as well as seminars for policy advisors ... not as a fundamentalist evangelist, rather ""SD is an invaluable tool which you must have in your policy development/analysis tool kit."" Access to these was never a problem, only time constraints and the demands of lecturing & consulting.

Major policy shifts resulting from application of SD? Any discipline that claims the full kudos for a decision is deluding itself. However, following a 1 hour executive briefing on SD, the then Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, on returning to his office, directed his HR department to find 'someone in Taxation with postgrad systems qualifications and send him to Canberra to study SD'. The chosen officer went on to introduce SD into various areas of the Australian Tax Office and into the wider community. In the lead up to a major revamp of Federal-State aged-care policy, the Federal Finance and Social Security Ministries jointly participated in an SD aged care modelling project, which had significant impact on the policy changes.
An SD - Cost Benefit project was instrumental in saving the New Zealand public service's central EEO unit, in the face of a determined effort by Treasury to eliminate it. I could go on with example after example. No, there is no giant SD model running the entire government, but ... there are many people who have been exposed to SD and who use qualitative SD in their day to day work, and a small number who build SD models to support policy analysis or program evaluation on a routine basis.

I can modestly claim some success in propagating SD, not because I am a brilliant modeller, but because I knew the government sector intimately; I understood the culture; I knew the language; I knew the issues; I could claim to be ""one of them""; I had experience with the many other ops research tools (econometric modelling, benefit cost analysis, linear programming etc), did not disparage them but could point to their strengths and weaknesses ... and where SD could fill major gaps. If any academic or consultant wants to 'infiltrate' SD into Government or private sector, you need to build similar credibility. Unfortunately all consultants, including system dynamicists, must overcome the ""snake oil merchant"" image and the image that consultants merely come in, borrow your watch ... in order to tell you the time.

Assuming you have all the credibility, where do you start: In the areas that are already sensitised to systemic thinking: the overseas aid area (as discussed in an earlier thread, worldwide, the government aid agencies apply a profoundly 'causal' evaluative approach that is crying out for SD); the environmental agencies; the audit agencies (indeed the internal audit and evaluation branches of every government and private sector agency); but most importantly, the policy development areas.

Is SD too hard? To me, this is like asking ""Is engineering too hard."" One doesn't become a mechanical engineer, or a dentist, or an economist without serious study. You don't become a system dynamicist on the basis of reading ""The Fifth Discipline"" and doing a 2 day Powersim course.

Is SD too difficult to communicate to the plebs or, which may be harder, to government executives? To me, this is like asking ""Is it too difficult to communicate macroeconomic issues, or OH&S issues to senior executives"".
Actually, come to think of it, whenever I have been in the position of having to communicate macroeconomic or public finance issues to Ministers or senior executives, I used SD concepts, including stock-flow diagrams & causal loops.

Is SD dead? To me this is like asking ""Is algebra dead"". There are no government guidelines on the application of algebra to policy development; there are no HR advertisements for 'algebraists' (but there are occasional Government ads for system dynamicists), etc etc. As with Mark Twain, the reports of SD's death have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, a measure of the vitality of SD is the MIT Literature collection DVD ... the breadth and depth of the application of SD in this collection is remarkable ... a 'steal' at $120 ( http://www.systemdynamics.org/MITCollec ... erForm.pdf ).

Are there areas where we system dynamicists have to lift our game?
Certainly. There is a classic project management cartoon which shows a wall sized PERT chat ... at the end of which is the note ""Here be a miracle.""
The corresponding SD cartoon would show a wall sized stock-flow diagram, at the start of which would be the caption ""Here be a miracle"". Despite the work of giants such as Checkland, Coyle, Wolstenholme, Senge etc, there is still no rigorous ""front end"", no ""business process methodology"" which provides a ""quality assured"" framework which will give a 'warm and fuzzy feeling' to clients.

Like the Blues Brothers, I may have ""seen the light"" and may be ""on a mission from God"". However, I do not believe that SD alone will save the world. Systems theory and systemic thinking, of which SD is a proud and important part, (hopefully) will.

I must get back to my SD consultancy. I've got to make a living somehow and SD modelling certainly beats the dole.


Keith Linard
134 Gisborne Road
Bacchus Marsh
Vic 3340
Posted by ""Keith Linard"" <klin4960@bigpond.net.au> posting date Fri, 2 Feb 2007 11:07:36 +1100 _______________________________________________

[Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jac]

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

Keith Linard writes:

< Despite the
< work of giants such as Checkland, Coyle, Wolstenholme, Senge etc, there is < still no rigorous ""front end"", no ""business process methodology"" which < provides a ""quality assured"" framework which will give a 'warm and fuzzy < feeling' to clients.

I agree highly to this statement.
The quality assured framework exists once a model is built, because one enters a scientific world.
But there is no clear path from the problem to the model.

I think that if the business process methodology provides a ""quality assured"" framework it will not only give a 'warm and fuzzy feeling' but a 'certitude' that the process will generate what it is supposed to deliver and mostly it will help not so expert modellers build quality models making the method available to more people.

Tom Fiddaman writes
< the low point for me after the dot.com crash was when someone approached me with an < < < $8,000,000,000 problem and a $5,000 budget.

What are the average stake and budget of the problems solved by Ventana's team ?

What are the minimal stake and budget of the problems solved by Ventana'
team?

Or let us say by similar experienced teams, so that the answer does not look as a Ventana's advertisement.

< given the time it takes to
< become a good practitioner, I think we might hope for 5 years but not 2

5 years of practice or five years of study are necessary to be a good practitioner?

What is a good practitioner, supposing that you can find one?
In France, finding somebody that declares using SD, is already very rare.

Is a good consultant somebody who knowing that whatever the results of his consultancy the probability that they get applied are low, will refuse to propose his services?

Is it necessary to be a good consultant, to be able first to detect if SD is the right methodology to apply, and if it is not the case, tell the client instead of trying to apply it forcefully?

Must a good consultant be able to verify that the stake is compatible with the necessary efforts to realize it and that the means necessary exist and if not tell the client of the impossibility?

And of course but that seems evident, the good consultant must be able to do the job?

If there is a consultant that speaks French and lives not too far from Paris and has the above qualities, I will consult him. If there is somenone that is not so near and does not speak French but has still all the other qualities (imperative!), I still may be interested.
Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé, Allocar
Member and shareholders of Eurli. Web site Eurli.com European group of independent car and truck renters.
Strasbourg France
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Fri, 2 Feb 2007 19:15:37 +0100 _______________________________________________

[""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforest]

Posted by ""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforestr@MIT.EDU>

We have recently seen many postings lamenting the slow growth and lack of acceptance of system dynamics. But, is system dynamics yet ready for more?

There seem to be expectations that the field of system dynamics should be given the status of a fully developed profession when, in fact, it is in the earliest stages of its development. Compared to its potential, system dynamics is perhaps now at about the stage that engineering was in the 1860s when MIT was founded, or the stage of medicine when the Johns Hopkins medical school was started in the late 1800s. In comparison to medicine, many of the messages in this thread seem to have expectations for our field that would be like a person with two years of premed followed by several years as an emergency medical technician on an ambulance wanting to have people then flock to him for heart transplants.

System dynamics has the potential to be a full-fledged profession with the depth and range of skills seen in engineering or medicine.
However, at this time, the academic programs in system dynamics should be considered only as introductory courses. So far, I see little discussion of building the kind of academic and apprenticeship framework necessary for creating truly professional competence in the field.

System dynamics is now on a plateau. It has gone about as far as it can based on the presently available foundation of concepts and educational opportunities. I am not saying that the far more advanced basis for a true profession should already have been done, any more that it would have been productive to have been anguished in 1860 that one still lacked the professional fields that would allow going to the moon.

Our situation arises partly from the fact that even a tiny amount of systems insight seems so revealing to those who have never previously ventured into the systems jungle. Those who have only been exposed to the loose talk of ""systems thinking"" find it sufficiently helpful that they think they have arrived, when actually they are probably only about one per cent of the way into systems. Likewise, the majority of those who have achieved the present average level of skill in system dynamics find it so powerful that they feel they have learned it all, when actually they have gone only a few percent of the way into the unknown of nonlinear feedback systems.

Perhaps this quote will help show the magnitude of the task ahead. It is from Ladis D. Kovach, in the paper, ""Life Can Be So Nonlinear,"" in the American Scientist, Vol 48, No. 2, June 1960:

""We have broken through the sonic barrier,... we are now at the
threshhold of the nonlinear barrier. This last seems the most
insurmountable. Strange that these nonlinear phenomena that
abound so widely in nature should be so intractable.., It is
almost as if Man is to be denied a complete knowledge of the
universe unless he makes a superhuman effort to solve its
nonlinearities... So far, our efforts to scale the nonlinear
barrier have consisted of chiselling a few footholds which are
low enough so that we can always keep one foot on linear ground.
We have, so to speak, located a few nonlinear zippers in the
blanket of nonlinearity that covers us. Opening these zippers
has allowed us to put our hand through and try to fathom the
vast unknown in this way. ... While the solutions to linear
problems can be called prefabricated, the solutions to
nonlinear problems are custom made. ... The nonlinear
barrier appears to be one of nature's least vulnerable
strongholds. Only vigorous attack from several directions
can hope to prevail against it.""

When I have time I will try to continue with more on what next.
Posted by ""Jay W. Forrester"" <jforestr@MIT.EDU> posting date Fri, 2 Feb 2007 18:57:31 -0500 _______________________________________________

[northsheep@juno.com >]

Posted by northsheep@juno.com


> Jay Forrester's original (and exciting!) vision of ""designing
> organizations"" has been completely lost by the SD community.


Whether or not it was lost by some, it was not lost on Peter Senge, as everyone knows. Yesterday I attended a workshop by Jamie Cloud http://www.sustainabilityed.org/ on designing public education for sustainability, in which ST tools played a dominant role. Her work is connected to Peter Senge's larger effort to redesign public education, whose practical lessons and tools are in the new Fifth Dimension
Fieldbook: Schools That Learn.

Despite considerable SD course work I may never become a professional SD modeler, but as one who is trying to make some of the ST and SD tools accessible to the average citizen I am gratified to see a strong movement picking up on Forrester's original vision! In the Ithaca NY community that is my potential constituency I was happy to see 70 public school and university teachers attend this workshop that included a strong introduction to the ST paradigm.

If ST can piggyback its way into public education on the rising interest in education for sustainability, I could not imagine better partners.

Maybe the emphasis on educational consulting can push

>> the right positive loops to accelerate the growth of the field.

Nothing like getting in on the ground floor.

Karl North
Northland Sheep Dairy, Freetown, New York USA Posted by northsheep@juno.com posting date Fri, 2 Feb 2007 13:35:55 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Parish, Doug"" <Doug.Parish]

Posted by ""Parish, Doug"" <Doug.Parish@valero.com>

I think Karl has hit the nail on the head. Public education is the key to moving systems thinking and systems dynamics into the main stream.
Public education has converted the theory of evolution into a fact, convinced millions of students that the Wright brothers were first in flight, and that the Constitution espouses a wall of separation between church and state. Pardon my sarcasm, but any system that can accomplish this in two generations should have no problem transforming ST and SD into household words and daily practice in much less time. The key is to get in tight with the textbook authors (or write the textbooks
ourselves) to ensure the concepts get into as many different subject textbooks as possible. Get teachers to workshops to develop their skills and the march to SD should be unstoppable.

I put myself in the novice class when it comes to SD and ST. I have read The Fifth Discipline and The Dance of Change. I met Mr. Senge and Mr. Sterman at the Boston meeting in 2005 and listened to Mr. Forrester at the same meeting. I find the concepts stimulating and exciting and very lacking in the business world. Using only causal loop diagrams and help from some friends, I was able to convince Vice Presidents of one of my former employers to intervene with several programs to prevent my workplace from becoming deserted before the process of closing the site was completed over a two-year span. Our success kept nearly 300 people employed for an extra 18 months, long enough for a buyer to appear and buy the site, saving all the jobs. SD can have a profound effect without creating any simulation models. Just the shear logic behind a good analysis of the problem and a well thought out CLD with feedback loops and how to affect them worked for us. Teaching these skills as early as possible in the public schools would have, I believe, a profound impact on problem solving skills throughout society. While my initial comments were slightly tongue-in-cheek, I wanted to pass on my view from a successful novice standpoint to go along with the views from higher level practitioners. My site is still in operation 10 years later. Some credit for that goes to a small group (2 or 3) of novices willing to take a shot with concepts they knew little about but felt they were the best tool for the situation. I really believe that the way to take SD to the next level is via the public education system.
Waiting until students reach college-level education leaves a large segment of the population lacking what we should consider as a basic skill.



Doug Parish
Valero Energy Corporation
The Lima Refinery
Lima, Ohio
Posted by ""Parish, Doug"" <Doug.Parish@valero.com> posting date Sat, 3 Feb 2007 16:21:44 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""Jim Thompson"" <james.thomp]

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

System Dynamics is a population model -- skilled people who practice a methodology. We need to pay closer attention to our reproduction activities and breeding stock. People who profess system dynamics methodology are in greater need.

Interest in and practice of system dynamics grew most quickly at the time of the National Model research program at MIT. Tackling a messy problem--such as exploring forces that could disrupt the economy--provided a mission and focus that attracted good thinkers.

The D-memo collection documents progress on several fronts: rigorous research, effective communication tools, engagement with the business community, and useful results.

There is reason to believe the essence of that experience could be repeated.
This listserv frequently hosts questions of social and economic policy. And there are several institutions where system dynamics has a good footing and a cadre of talented faculty. These institutions are potential spawning ground.

The issues posed in the original query seem to be symptoms of neglect. If research focus is development of robust organization or social policy, it is more important to stimulate thought and dialog than to produce a prescient forecast.

Organizing and pursuing focused research are crucial to increase the system dynamicist reproduction rate and prevent population collapse.
Jim Thompson
Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <james.thompson@strath.ac.uk> posting date Mon, 5 Feb 2007 23:29:29 -0500 _______________________________________________

[""James B. Berger"" <bergerjb]

Posted by ""James B. Berger"" <bergerjb@comcast.net>

I want to thank Richard Stevenson for his original post regarding the status of System Dynamics. He raised a question that I have had in my mind for the last couple of years. With the incredible power of System Dynamics, why does it not get much wider recognition and use? I hope the question does not die with this brief discussion.

I would like to make one simple suggestion, based in part on the several replies to this question. We need to expand the systemic boundaries of the question and the potential answers. We should consider System Dynamics in terms of more than the tools and the practitioners. We need to include consumers (those who ask for SD models) as more than sources and sinks in our model of SD success. We should consider them in terms of stocks and flows that provide invaluable feedback within the system of more widely considered systemic thinking.

The most successful businesses tend to include consumers as active elements in their business models (explicit or implicit). The success of System Dynamics will ultimately depend on those that want the output rather than the skills of those who practice SD modeling.

Jim Berger
Posted by ""James B. Berger"" <bergerjb@comcast.net> posting date Thu, 8 Feb 2007 09:04:44 -0700 _______________________________________________