SD Success

[Sam_B._Israelit.ANDERSEN_WO.ANDE]

As one of the lurkers on this list, I decided to jump in...

Augusto Carena asked:
"Why - if true - System Dynamics, in nearly four decades, did not exploit
(both in universities and in business) all the enormous potential that many
acknowledge and we practitioners feel? Is this a local problem (we work in
Italy) or a more generalized one?"

This is something I have often been asked in my work with clients. They all
come away very excited, but they want to know, if its really as powerful
as I say, why hasnt everyone been doing it?

I believe that there are several interrelated reasons (its all part of a
big diffusion system after all).

1). The technology for building models was not easy to use. While those of
us with engineering backgrounds didnt have a problem working out the
problems by hand or writing our own code to perform the numerical
integrations, the majority of the business world couldnt easily do it.
They viewed simulation as something that was done in the back room. Those
same business people, though, were the ones who were approving the money
and resources that were necessary to apply the concepts. Since they
couldnt do it, they didnt spend a lot of money on it. iThink and Vensim
have made it significantly easier for "the common person" to develop
powerful models with out having to bother with the details of numerical
integration and math.

2). The speed and scope of business interactions have been increasing
dramatically as a result of technology and global expansion. There are
mountains of information that need (do they really?) to be assimilated
before managers are ready to make a decision and they are expected to make
it in considerably less time than they used to be. I dont mean to say that
business was easy in the past; rather it has become a lot more complex.
We-management-continually evolved our focus in the direction of increasing
detail complexity. It was easier to break things into little "bite-size"
chunks than it was to understand the dynamics of what was happening--we
didnt have the methodology to understand the dynamic complexity. We are
trained from birth to take things apart to try to understand them; we
arent given a lot of guidance on putting them back together again to work
as a whole.

3). The early system dynamics work, though focused on organizational (ie,
business) problems, was written in technical terms. It was a fairly large
leap for managers to understand the work and apply it themselves. With the
publication of Peters book, there was a new language that made it easier
for business people to understand what it was that "those Cambridge people"
were talking about. "The Fifth Discipine" didnt teach how to do system
dynamics, it just popularized it and put helped people to pur into a
context with which they could relate. This has really accelerated the
demand side of the diffusion structure in recent years. Though system
dynamics isnt "hexagons and causal loops", they are important to help
people make the transition from cause and effect to feedback structures.

4). There just arent that many people who have had the opportunity to
study this stuff for a long period. We are finding, consistent with what
others have discovered, that to truly become skilled you need to apply the
concepts. This takes time and coupled with the delay is that other
pressures prevented people from spending too much time applying system
dynamics because it was immediately measurble how "improving the quality of
decisions" lead to better organizational performance. There are only a few
places in the world where you can get deep exposure to the field and only a
small fraction of the students in those schools want to study this field.

I have other thoughts, but Ill let someone else speak for now. Thanks for
reading and I hope this plants some seeds for thought.

One other thing. In SD0148, Gene wrote:

"...referring to what were doing as "Just In Time Learning." People seem
to immediately take to the techniques we offer as they immediately see
their applicability in terms of dealing with the dilemmas they are
currently facing."

We have been using a similar term, but we also added that when you
integrate system dynamics and scenario planning, you not only have just in
time, you have "Just in Case". System dynamics models enable you to be
proactive as well as reactive.

Regards,

Sam Israelit
Arthur Andersen Business Consulting
(617) 330-4102
sam.b.israelit@arthurandersen.com

[Jack Homer <70312.2217@CompuServ]

Speaking of "Success to the Successful", I recommend to all systems thinkers a
nifty little article in this weekends (May 5) New York Times Magazine, "Why the
Best Doesnt Always Win," by Peter Passell. Passell describes the phenomenon of
"path dependence", and gives a number of good examples going beyond the usual
Betamax/VHS story. He also gets into some of the public policy issues that path
dependence raises, and describes the failure of traditional economics to explain
the sometime success of inferior technologies.

Jack Homer
70312.2217@compuserve.com

["Scholl Greg"]

Not to harp, but I think this is an important point ...

Sam Israelit says:

"iThink and Vensim have made it significantly easier for "the common person"
to develop powerful models with out having to bother with the details of
numerical integration and math."

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a "powerful model" that was
developed by someone why hadnt a clue about "the details of numerical
integration and math." This is precisely the problem. Tools like iThink and
Vensim have made an immeasurable contribution to the field, but their dark
underbelly is the fact that people can build bad models quickly, get
frustrated and become convinced that the approach is flawed -- or, equally
damaging, build bad models quickly, not realize it, expose lots of people to
SD through the model and end up fizzling when either the model is never
completed, needs to be hard-wired to meet the clients deadline, doesnt
deliver any powerful insights (although powerful insights developed
independent of the model might be attributed to it), et cetera. Which is why
if you talk to people in places like DEC or Cummins Engine about the work done
there in the early 70s they are supporters, and if you talk to participants in
many other SD consulting engagements since then the enthusiasm is more
luke-warm.

I think it is important to deal in insights with people who dont know or care
about SD and deal in the roll-up-your-sleeves mathematical and methodological
detail with those people who do. To consult successfully using SD, you need
to do both, which is one of the things that makes doing it so difficult. (And
in fact, one of the advantages of tools like iThink and Vensim is that they
can be used for both creation and communication.)

All of the approaches that SD has spawned, like systems thinking, require
different things from the user, have different strengths and weaknesses and
are appropriate in different situations. That said, selling short the skills
required to develop *models* is unfair.

Greg Scholl
scholl_greg@bah.com

[CrbnBlu@aol.com]

As sort of a general thought on the state and pace of SD acceptance, isnt SD
just on the down side of a "Success to the Successful" Archetype? As Brian
Arthur stated it in economics terems, "He who has gets." And, its not SD
that is successful, in the largest percentage. It will be an up hill struggle
to get to 50.000...001% and then it will just be a landslide.

Realizeing the nature of the struggle we face I simply use every opportunity
possible to help people understand "their dilemmas" from a systems
perspective. In this way they come to see the value of it and accept it. And
yet I know I am doing little more than planting seeds that will hopefully
someday sprout when the time is right. I know these people I relate concepts
to must go back into the same non-systemic thought dominated structure and be
overcome. They need support systems, so I introduce them to this list, and
the Learning Org list, the Whole Systems list, etc.

We must pursue with an impatient patience or a patient impatience.

Gene Bellinger
CrbnBlu@aol.com

[tjoy@pps.k12.or.us (Timothy Joy)]

Gene B states:
>As sort of a general thought on the state and pace of SD acceptance, isnt SD
>just on the down side of a "Success to the Successful" Archetype? As Brian
>Arthur stated it in economics terems, "He who has gets." And, its not SD
>that is successful, in the largest percentage. It will be an up hill struggle
>to get to 50.000...001% and then it will just be a landslide.

The first 18 -24 months of my SD association and work reminded me of days
at the monestary-times of mystery, illumination and solitude. No one knew
what I doing, why I was doing it. One of my colleagues even said, "you
used to be a writer, now youre a computer nerd."

In the last eight months, I have a hard time keeping track of regular
school work; we are swamped with requests for ideas, clues, help, anything
relative to system dynamics. On a number of occasions recently, I have
thought I could not get more inquiries, and each time more things happen
and open up. Watch the next academic year.

>yet I know I am doing little more than planting seeds that will hopefully
>someday sprout when the time is right. . . They need support systems, so
>I introduce them to this list, and the Learning Org list, the Whole
>Systems list, etc.
>
>We must pursue with an impatient patience or a patient impatience.
In Tucson 95, Jay Forrester said we have to be ready commit our careers to
this. As Ed G says, forget the colleagues; teach the kids. Theyll know.


Students still ask sometimes, "Why are we doing this in English?" There it
is-Descartes is hard to let go of. As long as students (and people
generally) see what happens in schools as discrete acts of intellectual
activity, then we are in for a long, long haul. That framework must be
broken.

Timothy Joy
CC-STADUS: Cross-Curricular Systems Thinking and Dynamics Using STELLA
La Salle College Preparatory
11999 S.E. Fuller Road (503)659-4155
Milwaukie, OR 97222 (503)659-2535 (fax)
tjoy@pps.k12.or.us

"I must Create a System or be enslavd by another Mans.
I will not reason and Compare; my business is to Create."
-William Blake,