"Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenges managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions. All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems.
"Effective decision-making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems thinkers–to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior." (Sterman, Sloan School of Management, MIT, 2000)
First, "system dynamics is a method for studying the world around us." (MIT System Dynamics in Education Project [http://sysdyn.mit.edu/]) It helps us better understand the causes of interesting or surprising behavior, whether social, technological, or both.
Second,
system dynamics helps us to find solutions to persistent problems.
If the behavior under study is not only interesting or surprising, but
also undesirable, system dynamics can be used to find ways to improve that
behavior.
System dynamics, developed at MIT's Sloan School of Management over the past four decades, is a broadly applicable approach to problem solving. A real-life problem is interpreted into a feedback model that, first, can help us endogenously explain how the problem developed over time, and second, can assist us in finding a lasting solution to the problem.
System dynamics provides a way-of-thinking (a paradigm), and associated communication, and computer simulation tools, to help us design policies that provide durable solutions to our problems. In one real-world policy-design cycle, system dynamics enables us to experiment with competing policies in simulations, rather than directly in our 'less-amenable-to-experimentation' real-world environment. We then use the results of these policy simulation experiments to inform our policy choices in the real world.
The educational value of system dynamics includes cross-curricular communication (dialogue, research, writing, presentation) and real-world application of both mathematics and scientific thinking. More importantly, system dynamics, properly used in education, will "give students a more effective way of interpreting the world around them," and will help them "gain a greater and well-founded confidence for managing their lives and the situations they encounter." (Forrester, Sloan School of Management, MIT, 1994)
Better real-world understanding, better policies, and better performance can begin with a learning team's recognition of a problem as arising from a set of dynamically complex, ever-changing, interdependent, feedback relationships, followed by exploration and testing through 'system dynamics simulation assisted' critical thinking processes.
Sterman, John D. 2000 Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. [http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/BusDyn2.html] Irwin McGraw-Hill. John Sterman [http://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/] is J. Standish Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Director of MIT's System Dynamics Group. [to quote] [to people]
Forrester, Jay W. [http://sysdyn.mit.edu/people/jay-forrester.html] 1994 Learning through System Dynamics as Preparation for the 21st Century. Keynote address for the 1994 Systems Thinking and Dynamic Modeling in K-12 Education conference. Download document SE1994-07 [http://www.clexchange.org/cle_lom_syseducation.html] from The Creative Learning Exchange's 'Systems Education" page. Jay Forrester is Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is also the founder of the field of system dynamics. [to quote] [to people]