Ventana software support forum

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 _______________________________________________

Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se>

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

A separate ""professional"" conference is more of a commercial risk, requires a hard sell, and is usually best done by companies specializing in that type of conference. Reading the discussion in this thread it does seem as if a hard sell does not come natural to most of us.

Although being a consultant I very rarely attend ""professional"" conferences of the type described by Jim. I think that their main target group are practitioners using it to scan for topics and consultants hence the blatant selling by the presenters.

I find that I prefer conferences with academics, consultants and practitioners where there is sharing and discussion which increases my learning and sharpens my mind.

A safer way for the society to experiment with the idea could be to partially turn the last conference day into a professional day, in addition to the present workshops. My first sd conference was a bit of a shock as it seemed as if everybody had disappeared come Thursday morning.

Such a ""professional"" track need not only be restricted to consultants and practitioners. It might be useful also for academics to share experiences from projects. The difference between the main conference and the ""professional"" track could be that at the centre of the academic conference is the research question whereas the focus of the ""professional"" track would be the problem or issue of the client.

Paul Holmstrom
Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:28:34 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com>

Jim Hines writes, ""Why not have a ""professional conference"" that's separate from the existing conference?""

What is the point of being separate?

Why should academics feel they are immune from practitioners, or vice versa?

Why is 'practice-based presentation' alien to an SD conference? I am bemused.

Richard Stevenson
Valculus Ltd
UK
Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com> posting date Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:22:29 +0000 _______________________________________________

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

(was Future Development Directions)
Hi everybody.

Jim Hines is certainly right when proposing a professional conference.
I was only a three hours drive from Nijmeegen and nearly went to the conference.

But I was afraid of having not much in return.

If it had been a professional conference, I would have certainly attended the conference.

One another thing is that at a professional conference you find people that do not really know SD except as users. And this is what is lacking terribly in this forum and makes the field looks like a pure academic field, except the few, well known and everlasting examples of so-called 'concrete'
applications.

This conference does not need too to be four days long.

Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Tue, 20 Feb 2007 16:46:46 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by ""Bob Cavana"" <Bob.Cavana@vuw.ac.nz>

Good idea Jim!

However, may i suggest (in addition to continuing this electronic dicsussion) that we bring this up at the July Policy Council meeting of the System Dynamics Society (SDS) in Boston. we could link this to the topic of 'SD accreditation/ professional practice/ chartered membership etc'

To some extent we do have an excellent 'professional conference' in the ST/SD community - the systems thinking annual conference run by Pegasus Communications. see the web site:
http://www.pegasuscom.com/pc07/07guidelines.html for details re the 2007 conference.

Nevertheless i think there is room for more 'professionally oriented' SD conferences around the world, speciallising in specific 'domains' where SD & related 'systems/simulation' [or systems science & management science ] tools are applied.

for example these 'specialised' SD conferences could correspond to the special interest groups (SIGs) [and be principally organised by them with 'corporate'
sponsorship!!] eg:

health
economics
energy
information systems
education
public policy
operations/supply chain management
environment/natural resources
etc, etc

these specialised 'professional SD' conferences could combine 'pratice & theory'
hence be of great interest and value to practitioners and academics/educators in the specific areas.

maybe the SDS SIGs could discuss these ideas further and present their ideas at the Boston SDS policy council meeting in July.

all the best,

Bob

A/Prof Bob Cavana PhD, CMILT
Victoria Managent School
Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand
Posted by ""Bob Cavana"" <Bob.Cavana@vuw.ac.nz> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:59:19 +1300 _______________________________________________

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

Hi everybody.

I think that there is an ambiguity about the words 'professional conference'.
In a conference there are people who present their work or ability to other people who listen.

In the actual conference, people who present their work are mainly academics, some internal consultants and some consultants and the listeners are the same.

In that conference I do not think that there is one person who owns the problem and has no knowledge of SD: the usual final client from SD.

I first thought that Jim Hines was thinking about a conference where practitioners were selling their products to consumers. But later in his post, he forgets the end user and writes about SD practitioners.

For me SD eventually needs a conference for SD practitioners, that deals with SD practical technique.

But it needs too a conference, an exhibition or an exposition oriented towards people who own the problems and generally are not interested by the technique but by the results.

The people who are interested by the results are probably several tens of thousand more numerous than SD people and could at last be too considered!
It is important to decide what kind of conference we are talking about?

Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:47:30 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <jim@globalprospectus.com>

Replies by Paul Holmström, Jean-Jacques Laublé and Richard Stevenson to Jim Hines suggestion for a separate conference indicate that an ISDC day centered on practice makes sense.

My concern is content -- would such a forum attract a dozen good papers
every year? Perhaps the Business SIG can take the lead on researching and
proposing how it might work.

Jim Thompson
Posted by ""Jim Thompson"" <jim@globalprospectus.com> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 08:53:59 -0500 _______________________________________________

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

I would like to echo the sentiments of Paul Holmström. I stopped attending most ""professional"" conferences just because they were filled with people who did nothing but shill for their products and services. Very little content, a lot of sales.

As for the Systems Thinking conference run by Pegasus, they've priced themselves out of my market. Most conferences that are run for profit get awfully expensive for those of us who must pay our own way -- i.e., the ""professionals"" in the field.

The SD Society conference is just about right -- perhaps with the addition of a professional track, as Paul Holmström suggests. I want to hear what's being worked on and thought about by ""academics"" that hasn't hit print yet, I want new solutions to technical problems that I can adopt in my practice, and, yes, I also want to hear stories (""principles of practice"") from the trenches where SD has been applied to help clients.


John Gunkler
Posted by ""John Gunkler"" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 09:02:14 -0500 _______________________________________________

Posted by martin@utalca.cl <martin@utalca.cl>

Hi,

I'm at the same time fascinated by the last weeks' discussion and worried about it.

My short (since 2003) personal background as an academic does not allow me to talk much about the professional aspects of system dynamics. However, I believe there are at least two populations inside the SD community, and each has its reason to be.

In the professional area, there are people who use SD in their work, others who offer consulting services and the developers of SD software. Maybe those who use it in their work have too few time for developing full-blown simulation models each time; however, some basic insights about stock-flow relationships and feedback (with polarity) are still helpful, as long as one is not over-confident in intuitions.

I understand that SD was developed in the first place to just do this: overcome complex dynamics problems. I also believe it is a noble motive (regardless of if you do it for financial profit or other reasons).

But I believe there is still a place for academics (I hope so). For instance, some of them are working on the loop dominance, which has to do with how systems behave. Other academics are interested in how humans think about complex dynamic systems, how exactly we fail and how to help. Still others prefer scientific theory building over solving concrete problems. I do hope that these and other academic interests have their space in SD.

Just in this sense, ""Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one."" (said Goethe).

There have been different comments about the conference. Practitioners may wish more time to spend around their subject area (maybe according to SIGs).
But also academics have wondered if there could not be more about their kind of subjects; once a friend of mine (Camilo Olaya from Colombia) thought the threads outline in Business Dynamics (John Sterman, 2000) would give a nice
architecture:

Theory
- theory of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems;
- agent-based modeling;
- mental models, dynamics decision making and learning;
- organizational and social evolution.
Technology
- automated mapping of parameter space;
- automated sensitivity analysis;
- automated extreme condition testing;
- automatic, interactive parameter estimation, calibration and policy optimization;
- automated identification of dominant loops and feedback structure;
- automated help;
- visualization of model behavior;
- linking behavior to generative structure;
- data implementation;
Implementation
- communicating modeling insights;
- improving group modeling;
- speeding the process;
- integrating modeling methodologies;
- creating managerial practice fields;
- assessing outcomes
Education


Wouldn’t this way to organize help to have a conference for both, practitioners and academics?

I also wondered if there could be a clearer distinction between different types of papers to be presented:
- conceptual papers that are logically coherent but not yet empirically tested;
- in-progress papers about projects that are in the pipeline and present
interesting practical problems (about experimentation, for example);
- finished projects that report final results and insights.

The research sessions were a step in this direction; however, the time-per-speaker was much too short to have an interesting discussion (better to be in a poster) and also the allocation did not always do justice to the papers’
nature.

I think that for what concerns diffusing SD to other groups of people may be done by going to their meetings and sending manuscripts to their journals. And we shall be patient we cannot march faster than the music.

""Saludos"",

Martin Schaffernicht
University of Talca
Talca - Chile
Posted by martin@utalca.cl
posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:23:01 -0300 _______________________________________________

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

The idea of having a 'professional conference' is a good one. Of course, there are many of us who manage to teach, practice and conduct research. I believe that it is important to keep these three as close as practicable.
As recent Chair of the annual systems engineering conference in Australia, I have experienced first hand the value of having a fully refereed conference and a professional conference all in one. To separate them would risk creating a 'them and us' division, which would be damaging.

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 Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:35:27 +1000 _______________________________________________

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

Richard Stevenson asks the key question, why separate conferences?

a. First, they CAN be separated because they are not meaningfully synergistic. The orientation of a professional conference is what's established in the field; the orientation at an academic conference is what's new or unusual in the field. The focus of a professional conference is taken for granted at an academic conference; and the focus of an academic conference is at best a side point at a professional conference. An attendee at an academic conference wants to build on what is presented. An attendee at a professional conference is looking to imitate others or to hire them as consultants.

For example, an attendee at a professional conference wants to know how to explain the value of SD to people in her organization, she wants to know how she can bring an SD viewpoint into her organization and, importantly, who are the organizations or people who offer assistance. An attendee at an academic conference is interested in the latest findings on how humans make (or fail to make) good judgments, new mathematical techniques for analyzing system dynamics models, new formulations, and new conclusions about the dynamics of specific systems of interest (e.g. climate).

In short, the two conferences are separable because they serve two different, separable purposes.

b. The two purposes seem to interfere with eachother. Certainly my own experience is that conferences serve one or the other purpose, but not both
-- at least not both well. My experience is limited, so I'm interested in others' experience. In the meantime, it does seem that presentations geared toward explaining established practice are likely to be viewed by an academic audience as being either naïve or self-serving. In the former case, the academic audience presses the presenters to consider unusual cases or circumstances, while in the latter case the academic audience simply views the presenter as being uncouth. The professional audience in contrast views the talk as the reverse of naive and asks questions like what other companies are using this, how much data is required, who owns the model at the end? The professional audience understands that the talk is likely to be self-serving and does not consider that to be bad manners (within reason). Similar comments could be made about the two audiences differing responses to an academic talk, say one about new experimental findings concerning the psychology of decision making.

c. A separate professional conference probably would have little impact on the current conference, and any actual effect might well be beneficial.
For example, the size of the current conference is becoming an issue. As the conference size has risen above two hundred to four hundred (and beyond), the venues in which we can have the conference become increasingly limited and new people are more likely to feel lost in the crowd. If a separate conference siphoned off a few attendees to a more appropriate conference, that would be a good thing -- helping the academic conference hang on to its last vestiges of intimacy for a while longer. Or to take another example: The current conference tries to satisfy cost-conscious students as well as business people who require a convenient location and who are much less cost-sensitive. The result sometimes is that one or the other group (or both) is not fully satisfied. I think cost-conscious people have been more aggrieved lately; the grievance might be redressed if the academic conference could focus more on this constituency and less on another.
Posted by ""Jim Hines"" <Jim@ventanasystems.com> posting date Wed, 21 Feb 2007 12:39:48 -0500 _______________________________________________

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

Richard is puzzled why a separate business conference or day is needed.
< Why should academics feel they are immune from practitioners, or vice versa? > .. the fact is that relatively few practice-based presentations are *offered* to the conference. There is certainly no prejudice against such presentations in the submission and review process - indeed rather the reverse .. my impression is that reviewers pounce on anything that looks like a good example of good application of SD. Can Richard or anyone else point to good practice-based papers or presentations that have not been accepted for the SD conference?

Two reasons why business people might not be interested in the current SD conference. First is that business applications are [rightly] only a small fraction of the topics the annual International SD conference covers.

Secondly, the needs of academics from academic conferences can be quite different from the needs of practitioners, as the history of the Strategic Management Society [SMS] annual conference shows. Originally positioned as the 'A-B-C' strategy conference, it attracted for many years all the big names in the field from business schools and consulting firms, plus plenty of top managers. It was promoted by key academics on the [tongue-in-cheek] basis that:

- Academics have the clever ideas
- Business people come to the conference to learn about them first
- Consultants then copy what the As and Bs do and sell it to other companies

The reality has become that business people and consultants lost interest in just talking about their accomplishments to competitors and academics, so it fell to the academics to supply the content. The remaining business people did not see much useful in what the SMS Academics were saying [e.g. large numbers of after-the-event statistical analysis papers] .. but lots of academics turn up to exchange what they are investigating, because that's a first stage of how they get their papers into academic journals. They get into top academic journals by showing they are moving forward the science, not by demonstrating application value in the real world.

So more and more academics turn up at SMS, fewer and fewer business people and consultants turn up. Last one I went to in the US had ~500 delegates of which >80% were academic, >15% consultants and <5% business people. And the consultants were only there to see if there was anything they could take away and sell, not giving presentations about great strategy work they had done for clients.

Nothing wrong with that kind of conference, of course, but it's not useful to busy executives.

My impression is that the SD conference has resisted this pressure more successfully, but it's tough. This conference must be useful to academics, in order to bring through the bright youngsters - whether they end up going into academia or business. This makes it real hard to get execs away for 1 day, let alone 2 or 3, because it has to be nearly all directly relevant.

A business-oriented day at the end just might work, but would have to show plenty of real applications with real value, and neither business people nor many consultants have much incentive to show up and give away their competitive advantage. [There is one significant consulting group in the field who keeps its cards *very* close to its chest, and never shows up, but we can be sure they scan this discussion - you know who you are!]. But perhaps such an event could be aimed at enlarging the cake for all to take a bite - which suggests it would need to be promoted jointly by the consulting firms. As a very small representative of this group, my problems would be [a] persuading clients to be open about what was done, and persuading them it was a good use of their time to come and talk about it. Perhaps Richard and others have got some more amenable clients?

BTW - not sure the Pegasus conference represents this alternative SD-for-business conference, unless it has changed a lot. It used to be largely qualitative systems thinking and a lot of related non-system-dynamics content. Again - nothing wrong with that, but it's not what business people *could* obtain from a focused system dynamics event.

Kim
Posted by ""Kim Warren"" <Kim@strategydynamics.com> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:40:27 -0000 _______________________________________________

Posted by ""Galan, Ricardo"" <RICARDO.GALAN@saic.com>

I will agree with John Gunkler's email.

I also have stopped attending the SD conference, because most of the work presented is very high-level and/or academic in nature. Additionally, attending this conference has become hard to justify to my employer, since the applied knowledge gained is small.

I believe the best solution is to add a ""professional"" track. Or maybe the solution should be to restructure the track in a way that fosters the submission of papers for ""professional"" applications.

I have been attending the Winter Simulation Conference, which has included a System Dynamics track (mostly with a ""professional""/applied focus). The papers submitted at this conference include a variety from academic to applied topics.

Keep up this great discussion.

_______________________________________________

Ricardo Galan
Science Applications International Corporation 1710 SAIC Drive | MS 2-6-9 | McLean, VA 22102 Posted by ""Galan, Ricardo"" <RICARDO.GALAN@saic.com> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:28:43 -0500 _______________________________________________

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

Hi everybody

I think that Jim Hines is right, but that there should be three manifestations.

One for the academics and practitioners interested by more theoretical papers, one for practitioners that are looking for more practical papers and one for non SDers interested by results.

But life being not ideal, one must consider that one conference is existing and growing which is already not so bad, although as Jim mentioned it, growth can lead to problems too.

And 400 attendees are to my opinion already too much and proves the diversity of the subjects that is interesting for people who have the time but not so much for people who don't.

So more conferences should be good, but preferably should not be included in the actual one, because of the risk to deserve it and to satisfy nor the academics, nor the practitioners and nor the end users.

For example, I would be interested to attend the OR conference in Prague, where there is a thread about system dynamics and another one about revenue management.
It is 4 days long and I am definitely not interested by attending the say 'Semi-Infinite Optimisation' conference or other exotic subjects (but wait a moment, this is maybe the key to my problems!) to occupy my time during these four long days.
I apologize by advance if by bad luck there is in the SD mailing somebody interested in the afore mentioned subject.
I will wait until the papers are published and if I find one or two really interesting subjects I may go and occupy the rest of my time visiting the neighbourhood.

About the program proposed by Martin Schaffernicht, although being interesting, I must say that, fortunately I do not need these progresses and can manage without them, but would be interested to see how SDers use already well established techniques.

Regards to everybody and especially to 'semi-infinite optimisation'
aficionados that I will heartily grant the permission to make fun of 'revenue management' my hobby in return.

Jean-Jacques Laublé.
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 18:53:42 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by Anupam Saraph <anupamsaraph@gmail.com>

I have worked on and with many professional societies. In my experience the best annual conferences have always been recognized as a wonderful place for **exchange** and **cross-fertilization** of ideas. These have been places to give people who come from different organizations and sectors a way to advance a common mission.

What is the common mission? How do we seek to promote it, together?

Anupam

Anupam Saraph, Ph.D.,
Clinical Professor,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Posted by Anupam Saraph <anupamsaraph@gmail.com> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:30:30 -0500 _______________________________________________

Posted by Bill Braun <bbraun@hlthsys.com>

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

> ... and makes the field looks like a pure academic field, except the
> few, well known and everlasting examples of so-called 'concrete' applications.
>

I'm not sure the evidence supports this conclusion. Posts from Harris, Gunkler, Homer, Sterman, Hirsh, Thompson, Milstein, and McDonnell, to name a few, speak repeatedly to their work in the field. Save for ""Principles of Systems"" all of Jay's books are grounded in the real world.

Of the 30 or so SD book in my library, 75% of them are of the ""managerial application"" type. When I'm trying to get insight into concrete problems, they are useful; that speaks for itself.

I am a bit weary of the assumption that learned, academic people are incapable of wrapping their hands around a real problem for reasons other than a theoretical spin around the block. Is it not possible to be both - grounded in reality and intellectually curious?

I find Jim Hines' suggestion to be viable and stimulating. I would attend. And I would continue to attend the annual ISDC; I like both worlds, appreciate both worlds, and find value in the thinking that takes place in both worlds.

The field benefits from both, in the same way two columns support a single lintel.

Bill Braun
Posted by Bill Braun <bbraun@hlthsys.com> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:48:14 -0500 _______________________________________________

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

I believe the best 'professional conference' is one where there is a good mix of academia (with a strong focus on pushing the theoretical boundaries, whilst protecting the foundations), business AND Government (with a focus on application from both user and practitioner perspective, whilst protecting ""best practice"")

Innovation and theory are not the unique preserve of academia ... There are innumerable examples around the world of private sector and (non university) public sector applied research facilities which are pushing the theoretical boundaries. At the same time, most university business schools are extremely active in consulting ... rather than being 'Ivory Towers', the greater danger is that their business activities can overshadow the academic.

If the argument is that we should relax the standard of papers accepted (on the presumption that academic papers have a higher standard and therefore dominate), as a reviewer over the past 5 years I have recommended the rejection or rewriting of more academic submissions ... on technical professional grounds ... that those from applied practitioners.

When I was hired as a Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, arguably Australia's most prestigious --- at least in the management field --- my 'riding orders' from the head of faculty was to 'do on average
1 to 2 days private consulting a week to bring academic theory and discipline to today's business problems'. I suggest the best system dynamics academics are those who have a similar mentality.


Keith Linard
134 Gisborne Road
Bacchus Marsh
Vic 3340
Posted by ""Keith Linard"" <klin4960@bigpond.net.au> posting date Fri, 23 Feb 2007 06:35:24 +1100 _______________________________________________

Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se>

I just did a quick scan of one-tenth of the members of the society. About 45% seem to be non-academics. So far most of the practitioners have in this thread said that they want to participate in a conference embracing academics and practitioners. More academics than practitioners have suggested a separation of conferences.

I very much doubt that it would be economically viable for the society to have separate conferences, particularly since indications are that such a large proportion of the membership do not wish to participate in a conference solely for practitioners.

I do not believe that the interests and purposes of academics and practitioners are as disparate as Jim Hines suggests. As to cost many of us practitioners are cost-conscious self-employed consultants.

I think it would benefit the society as a whole if we did try to find out how we at the same time and location can hold a conference catering for the wide variety of interests found in a society such as ours. Surely a program committee can provide a wide variety of content and let each participant vote with his/her feet as to what sessions to attend.

Paul Holmstrom
Posted by Paul Holmström <ph@holmstrom.se> posting date Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:16:18 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by Francisco Perez <francisco77pp@yahoo.com>

Hello everybody, I almost never post in this forum, I like to be a spectator of the many interesting discussions. However, this time I'd like to add a few words about this issue.

I think this thread has come up with many interesting replies. My opinion is that we should let people and/or members give also their opinion instead of talking on their behalf. I do find the proposal of doing a professional ""activity"" very interesting and rich and I think it does not oppose the usual ISDC. Whether they have to be separate or put together is a matter of ""demand"" and SD Society democracy issue. I refer to (a) demand because that is what will make it profitable or at least come to break-even and (b) ""SDS's democratic issue"" because it is, in first instance, the members who should ""vote"" whether this should come to reality or not.

It is also convenient to ask ourselves which are the %'s of participation of every member in the Society's acitivities. If 45% (as previously stated in this forum) of the members come from non-academic world, then let them have their word, if they don't pronounce about it, let the SD Society ask them to.

I think this thread is part of many others which have shown up in this forum, manifesting some of the uncomfortability about the management of the organization of the topics treated in th SD Society. Please, for those in charge of this, take this as a constructive observation, I know that many of you are putting lots of energy to assist the society with this duty. I've talked with many of you directly, that we need more organization in this forum and in the society as to themes of interest.
We should take advantage of this (re)-awakening and plan a series of acitivities to come to a consensus.

My best regards to all of you
Francisco
Posted by Francisco Perez <francisco77pp@yahoo.com> posting date Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:01:51 -0800 (PST) _______________________________________________

Posted by ""Radzicki, Michael J"" <mjradz@WPI.EDU>

Dear Colleagues:

Currently, the best entities for organizing conferences (and other
activities) dedicated to system dynamics and its practical application to business and consulting (within the System Dynamics Society anyway) are the ""Chapter"" and the ""Special Interest Group"" (SIG). The System Dynamics Society already has a ""Business"" SIG, and nothing prevents it (or perhaps a newly created chapter) from organizing conferences, publishing papers, creating web sites, organizing threads at the annual SD conference, etc., etc., etc.

My own experience with the Economics Chapter of the System Dynamics Society is that organizing Chapter sessions and activities at economics conferences (and NOT at the annual System Dynamics conference) has been a VERY successful strategy. We talk to the right kind of economists and are able to quickly get deeply into issues of interest to everyone: economic dynamics. Moreover, some of these economists have become so interested in SD that they have started to apply it in their research.

I firmly believe that the chapters and SIGs are the future of the System Dynamics Society and that they should be used to bring system dynamics to those who might otherwise never be exposed to its potential benefits.

For more information on chapters and SIGs, point your browser to:

http://www.systemdynamics.org/society_a ... tyChapters

Cheers.

Mike Radzicki
Past President
System Dynamics Society
Posted by ""Radzicki, Michael J"" <mjradz@WPI.EDU> posting date Sat, 24 Feb 2007 11:27:40 -0500 _______________________________________________

Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com>

I absolutely recognise the dynamics that Kim Warren describes.
Francisco Perez also makes some very interesting suggestions that reflect my own thoughts.

Perhaps this opens up a more practical discussion - the potential to develop an international network of competent SD business consultants that will collaborate rather than compete. The potential market is so huge - and the supply of competent practitioners so small - that we surely need to take a new approach to SD business development.

It is of course very difficult to get consultants and clients to turn up at conferences and talk openly about their work. Apart from confidentiality issues, the time required to write papers to ""academic"" standards is a considerable barrier - there's little or no financial return, except perhaps in respect of long-term academic reputation building. That's important to academics - less so to consultants and even less to clients.

There is a natural tendency among consultants to ""play things close"", as Kim describes. I am sure I know exactly the consulting group that Kim refers to. They have a reputation for inviting other front line consultants to talk about their work at their own ""internal""
conferences - so as to learn from them - but do not participate in the SDS. By keeping things close, they use their (considerable) reputation to leverage client fees on claims of unique competence.

At the other extreme I also know a large modelling group in another of the big consulting firms that desperately wants to sell SD - but lacks the courage to build the internal capacity and competence to deliver good client work. As far as I know, they don't participate in the ISDS either.

In between, and worldwide, there is a plethora of individual consultants and small consulting firms that do good SD work that largely goes unreported. Working alone, in different industries, in different continents, to different standards, and (apparently) having every disincentive to collaborate.

I suggest that, rather than playing things close, there is now every reason for competent professional consultants ( I include competent practitioners in businesses) to share their expertise and experiences more widely. To grow the market, we need more focus and more publicity - we need organisation and ""war stories"".

>From a personal perspective, my company has a ""war chest"" - two
decades of practical SD consulting work - that I would love to be able to disseminate in a form that is both ""client-sanitised"" and ""non-academic"". How can we make such experience useful - and dare I say it, profitable?

But perhaps above all, we need to address seriously the question of competence. Almost anybody can buy a copy of iThink, Powersim or Vensim and become an instant ""consultant"". To establish SD as a
serious professional discipline, we need a more rigourous stance.
Again, my company has a formal competence framework that we developed a decade ago - that we would be happy to contribute, given the appropriate forum.

Some form of international SD business network, maybe? But I'm not sure that the ISDS is the place to host this. All comments welcome.

Richard Stevenson
Valculus Ltd
UK
Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com> posting date Sat, 24 Feb 2007 14:09:53 +0000 _______________________________________________

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

Hi Mike and Richard

Mike noted that there was already a Business S.I.G..
There are actually 28 members in this group that is not very active; One post now and then, with answers sometimes.
Many members have given neither their curriculum nor even their names.
There are four or five active members, I can name three, Ralf Lippold , Kim Warren and me.

Two models have been posted, one in English from me, and another one in French from me too. (If the model in French had interested someone I would have translated it).

I thought that both models could interest somebody: one was describing a business built on a bubble, and was calculating the time and the conditions of the collapse etc.

The other one was using SD to calculate the cost of a car.

I never had any feed back from both models.

I do not know if the subjects were not interesting, if the models were just plain wrong or not well documented. I just had no feed back. I would have preferred somebody telling me that it was pure rubbish, than having no appreciation.

Somebody lately from the Sig asked me to post a model I had been talking about. But why should I take the time to translate the model, write an accompanying paper, just to have no answers?

I say that because there is a difference between words and actions.
Talking is easy, doing is difficult.

And I think that in this thread there is a lot of talking and not very much of doing.

About the opposition between academics, consultants and final users (generally not considered!), preferably to trying to build a week and illusory consensus between different and legitimate worldviews, leading to weak actions or no actions at all, it would be better to recognize the differences and learn to act positively without that consensus.

Good methods seem to exist in the soft system thinking; SODA and especially SSM that help people with different worldviews, act positively without having to negate their ideas by a consensus.

I do not know how SSM works practically but there are certainly in the SD community people that use these methods.

About the reflections of Richard, I share his ideas about the difficulty to motivate consultants or even business people to inform other people about their expertise.

First of all, it is difficult to interest someone about a subject he is not by his current work interested in.

Secondly businesses people do not sell SD, they use it.

For instance nobody will care if I publish a paper at the SD conference, professionally speaking. I do not mind being or not recognized by the profession, I just use SD and like the field but SD is not my profession. If I publish anything I have been working on, it will probably interest extremely few people. I never saw any reference to revenue management browsing the papers from past SD conferences (except one apart from mine and very short), and if it interests someone, it is at the risk of stealing my work, without any compensation. (Big service companies spend a lot of money to define coherent pricing strategy and I think that the revenue management field would profit from the SD methodology).

Why should I bother?
Being still optimistic, I urge Richard Stevenson, to manifest himself at the Business S.I.G.
That may be a first little step.
Regards to everybody.
Jean-Jacques Laublé.
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:20:30 +0100 _______________________________________________

Posted by <richard.dudley@attglobal.net>

I agree with Keith's comment:

""I believe the best 'professional conference' is one where there is a good mix of academia (with a strong focus on pushing the theoretical boundaries, whilst protecting the foundations), business AND Government (with a focus on application from both user and practitioner perspective, whilst protecting ""best practice"")""

Moreover I am a bit disturbed by the use of ""professional"" to exclude academics. Surely academics are also professionals. Perhaps another term is more appropriate

The boundaries between academics, business people, government agency workers, and those working in international agencies or organizations, are not that clear. These are fuzzy boundaries. Many academics, both system dynamicists, and of those in other fields, do real hands on practical research... as in my own field of natural resource management -- fisheries.
Perhaps it is because my field is closely linked with official agencies, rather than business per se, that I see the issue this way. But I have always felt that academics, at least in applied sciences, and the real world
are pretty closely linked. I believe this is also true of the health
sciences where the distinction between academics and practitioners is not clear at all -- they are all working to solve real-world problems in a practical way.

One of the benefits I get from the conference is learning what people in other areas are doing with system dynamics: How is SD being applied, how it is being useful, how it can be improved.

____________________________

Richard G. Dudley
Posted by <richard.dudley@attglobal.net> posting date Mon, 26 Feb 2007 07:07:32 +0700 _______________________________________________

Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com>

Jean-Jacques Laublé asks ""why should I bother?"" and then invites me to join the business SIG. I thank him for that.

But I am not at all sure (not least because of all the recent correspondence on this forum) that the SIG is the most appropriate forum, nor a sufficiently high leverage approach for what I want to do - which is to inform and develop a wide community of business managers to apply SD to make better informed decisions in the interests of all stakeholders - based on resource-based thinking, value-based thinking and transparency.

At the risk of repetition, I believe that the ""bottom up"" approach
that we have adopted in business for 50 years has run its course.
Even Jay himself appears to agree, ""SD is on a plateau"". Business people just do not want to learn this stuff from loops, nor stocks and flows. They don't have time. They just want better decision tools.

I think that toolset integration via the web is the key - not stock and flow, stand-alone models, nor business games, nor organisational learning. We need to integrate SD with other major strategy contributions - especially corporate finance (valuation) and balanced performance planning (scorecards/strategy maps).

SD cannot make it alone in business strategy. It's time for a significant reappraisal. I am perfectly prepared, as Jean-Jaques suggests, to contribute. But I now believe we need a new, broader f orum for new thinking that will specifically engage other disciplines to attract business people - not the SD business SIG.

On a different note, there has now been a full month's worth of discussion on these topics. Somebody should summarise the broad conclusions. I could have a go but I have not the time and my own stance is too polarised. Anyone know a competent student who could have a bash?

Richard Stevenson
Valculus Ltd
UK
Posted by Richard Stevenson <rstevenson@valculus.com> posting date Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:09:44 +0000 _______________________________________________

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

Hi Colm

There are certainly other reasons not to communicate their work from business people besides the risk of opening their kimonos.

First communicating to uniformed populations about a problematic situation is difficult.
Academic people (people teaching) are more prepared to this kind of difficulty.

Secondly a concrete application is very different from a text book example.
I did not find any SD book that really explains the difficulty of using SD with a concrete real example.

For example communicating my problematic even to SD people would take several hours and the way the SD conference is working is not adapted to this situation. After having spent several hours explaining the context, it would take another several hours to explain the difficulties and the experiences accumulated through the time.

I do not think that anybody in the SD conference would accept to spend that time, unless being especially interested in the subject.
And after all that work what would be the payback for an eventual candidate accepting to spend a lot of time preparing the documentation etc..?

One must understand that the motivation of business people is not the same as academics (publish or perish).

The problem encountered by the SD community is not unusual.
I am a member of INFORMS and member of the revenue management and pricing section.
In that section, things are worse than in the SD business SIG.
There are no posts, and the only justification of the section is to prepare some papers in the annual conference!
And revenue management and pricing is a field with much more books, reviews and consultants than SD.

There are too in the main reviews a lot of papers that as a practitioner I find unusable.
I have unsubscribed to all the revenue management reviews I tried to decipher.

So one must accept some realities and be already happy that there is an annual SD conference, an SD forum and SIGS, even if there is a lot to improve.
Regards.
Jean-Jacques Laublé.
Allocar Strasbourg, Eurli France.
Posted by Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble@wanadoo.fr> posting date Fri, 2 Mar 2007 10:43:59 +0100 _______________________________________________