To be in the best position to deal with complexity, decision makers must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches and learn how to employ them in combination. Systems thinking must be implemented more generally, and on a wider scale, to address these issues.Īn evaluation of different systems methodologies suggests that they concentrate on different aspects of complexity.
Leaders of international bodies such as the UN, OECD, UNESCO and WHO - and of major business, public sector, charitable, and professional organizations - have all declared that systems thinking is an essential leadership skill for managing the complexity of the economic, social and environmental issues that confront decision makers. Simple solutions to complex problems are often inadequate and risk exacerbating the original issues. They must deal with problems that arise unexpectedly, generate uncertainty, are characterised by interconnectivity, and spread across traditional boundaries. Decision makers at all levels are required to manage the consequences of complexity every day. The world has become increasingly networked and unpredictable. The paper closes by reprising the nature and potential of ‘BehSD’ and by sketching how research that adopts this perspective might go forward. It builds on this by proposing a definition of ‘Behavioural System Dynamics’ (BehSD) in terms of its perspective on phenomena, five new, constitutive axioms, and its potential for improving practice. It then offers a new and detailed framework of the stages of an SD-based intervention, indicating the presence of behavioural effects and providing a fine-grained discussion of those effects as they apply to SD. This is done using examples dealing with complex systems in a ‘naïve’ versus a ‘sophisticated’ way, and then using a mind map. The core of the paper then explores in depth how behavioural ideas apply to SD. To refocus the underlying ideas it then returns to the Decision Theory roots, takes a broader view using an illustration from the history of science and then builds on work which first proposed a link to System Dynamics (SD). The paper first raises concerns about the current state of ‘Behavioural OR’ – BOR. This can shed light on the cognitive and human interaction aspects of the process and outcomes of modelling. The idea is that humans frequently do not employ strict rationality in their daily lives but make errors and are subject to fallacies. This paper considers whether this can be applied to System Dynamics modelling in a useful way.
System Dynamics Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of System Dynamics Society.Īttempts to examine so-called ‘behavioural effects’ have reached into many different fields and are in full sway across OR. The paper explores the unusual interaction, drawing out the points of disagreement and agreement in the views of the two and how they applied these to thinking about the future. The two had fundamental differences on key points. Most notable, however, is that the encounter saw the two exchanging ideas on how to think about the future, how to bring about a desirable future, and quite what that desirable future should look like. What emerges in passing is a possible link between Asimov's thinking and Forrester's work on “World Dynamics”. Their lengthy exchange took place at a workshop in 1975 and four descriptions of it are extant. This article describes an encounter between servomechanism innovator, digital computing pioneer and creator of system dynamics, Jay Forrester, and Isaac Asimov, renowned author of science fiction (including “The Foundation Trilogy” and its fictional discipline of psychohistory) and works of popular science.