QUERY Stock and flow diagrams of Senge Archetypes

George A Simpson · Post by **George A Simpson** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 5:59 pm

Posted by George A Simpson <gsimpso4@csc.com> Does anyone know of a mapping from Senge's archetypal patterns into stock and flow notation?

We are interested in this for pedagogical purposes.

..george...

Dr. George Simpson, Principal Consultant, CSC Posted by George A Simpson <gsimpso4@csc.com> posting date Mon, 4 Dec 2006 14:58:05 +0000 _______________________________________________

Russell Bradshaw · Post by **Russell Bradshaw** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:47 pm

Posted by Russell Bradshaw <russell_bradshaw@yahoo.co.uk> George,

I'm aware of a website by Gene Bellinger that seems to fit your description:

http://www.systems-thinking.org/arch/arch.htm

The website is very approachable for a layperson, such as myself. I believe it also contains downloads of sample models in various simulation packages should you need to explore it further.

I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Russell Bradshaw
Reseach Consultant
Posted by Russell Bradshaw <russell_bradshaw@yahoo.co.uk> posting date Wed, 6 Dec 2006 00:53:35 +0000 (GMT) _______________________________________________

Rod MacDonald · Post by **Rod MacDonald** » Wed Dec 06, 2006 6:47 pm

Posted by Rod MacDonald <Rod@isdps.org> Hello George,

You might want to check out the following paper:

Simulation of System Archetypes, A. M. Dowling, R. H. MacDonald, and G. P. Richardson. In Proceedings of International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, held in Tokyo, Japan, Summer 1995; p 454-463.

Anne Dowling and I wrote this paper as an assignment in a system dynamics class that George Richardson taught. I have a PDF version of this paper if anyone is interested they can contact me directly.

Rod MacDonald
Posted by Rod MacDonald <Rod@isdps.org> posting date Tue, 5 Dec 2006 14:25:28 -0500 _______________________________________________

Willem Geert Phaff · Post by **Willem Geert Phaff** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 3:40 pm

Posted by Willem Geert Phaff <h.w.g.phaff@tudelft.nl> Hi Rod,

Since I'm doing some (not much

) research on the archetypes and their behaviour, I'd be very much interested in an authoritative, rather minimal implementation of the archetypes.

By the way, the implementation of the ""limits to growth"" presented the most difficulties for me. The behaviour of the archetype can never be caused by an unforced first order differential equation, since it is non-monotone.
Consequently, the limiting condition should be time dependent and would force the system behaviour. However, this would be a rather bad implementation, since in that case, an exogenous factor would determine system behaviour. Any thoughts on this?

Regards,

Willem Geert Phaff
Posted by Willem Geert Phaff <h.w.g.phaff@tudelft.nl> posting date Wed, 06 Dec 2006 19:11:42 +0100 _______________________________________________

George Richardson · Post by **George Richardson** » Thu Dec 07, 2006 3:58 pm

Posted by George Richardson <gpr@albany.edu> Years ago, I assigned one of my doctoral seminars the task(s) of building formal models of all the archetypes in the Fifth Discipline and in the Pegasus publications by Dan Kim. It was a revealing exercise.

Some are trivial, e.g., growth to a limit or escalation. Some are hard, e.g., fixes that fail is difficult because it is far from clear what might a (the?) stock in the simple system. One gets different results depending on what one takes for the stock. Some are impossible, I think, e.g., Senge's loops for the tragedy of the commons don't seem to capture the dynamics of such tragedies.

I could search my records for the results of the seminar if you like, but others may be able to come up with such models quicker from their work.

George P. Richardson
Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany - SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 Posted by George Richardson <gpr@albany.edu> posting date Wed, 6 Dec 2006 09:28:16 -0500 _______________________________________________

Post by » Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:40 pm

Posted by <D.C.Lane@lse.ac.uk>
I'd like to add my voice to Rod's. The Dowling paper is a superb one to look at.

That paper, and the Bellinger work that has also been referred to, are both discussed in:

Lane, D. C. and C. Smart (1996). ""Reinterpreting 'Generic Structure':
Evolution, Application and Limitations of a Concept.""

System Dynamics Review 12(2): 87-120.

This paper contains a discussion about the issues involved with getting from Archetypes to models, the question that George Simpson originally asked.

D. C. Lane BSc MSc DPhil FORS

Reader in Management Science
London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street, LONDON WC2 2AE, Britain Posted by <D.C.Lane@lse.ac.uk> posting date Wed, 6 Dec 2006 18:30:04 -0000 _______________________________________________

DGPacker@aol.com · Post by **DGPacker@aol.com** » Thu Dec 28, 2006 1:41 pm

Posted by DGPacker@aol.com
Some time ago, Jim Hines developed a pretty full set of achetype models and
some exercises using them. We used these in management sessions and found the
ability to simulate to be very captivating to participants. It built on the insights gained from causal loops alone as it gave the ability to explore the
(wide) range of behaviors that resulted from parameter changes, increasing the appreciation for how structure links to dynamic behavior.

Dave Packer
Systems Thinking Collaborative

Posted by DGPacker@aol.com
posting date Wed, 27 Dec 2006 09:05:11 EST _______________________________________________