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A few days ago I found a parcel from the System Dynamics Society in my mailbox. No surprise, because I can’t stop looking for interesting sources regarding systems thinking. The System Dynamics Society has a DVD series with a PhD seminar in System Dynamics with Jay Forrester from 1999. The series consists of 11 sessions, one DVD for each session. Each session is 3 hours long. You also get a CD with recommended readings (pdf format) for each session. Jay Forrester is the father of System Dynamics, which is in many ways, is foundational to systems thinking. This first DVD was very interesting. The series will be a nice complement to the course from UNESCO which is very hands-on. I like to hear and read about a subject from different viewpoints.

The series consists of
A  What is System Dynamics?
B  World Dynamics
C  Corporate Growth
D  Non-linearity
E  Theory Underlying Modeling
F  Group Model Building
G  Confidence in Models
H  The National Model
I  Ethics in Modeling
J  System Dynamics in Management Education
K The Future of System Dynamics

In a few days a PSL course will start in Stockholm with me as one of the participants. PSL means Problem Solving Leadership and this is what it’s all about.

For 34 years, Jerry Weinberg has continuously kept improving the Problem Solving Leadership workshop, which he invented together with his anthropologist wife Dani Weinberg back in 1974. The almost week-long (sunday to friday) workshop is about how to think and act clearly, creatively, and congruently – even in chaotic situations. Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby are co-hosting the PSL workshop with Jerry. Esther and Johanna are both internationally renowned consultants and writers; but most importantly for this workshop: they are the best facilitators there are for this setting. One thing should be stated early about PSL: there are no powerpoint slides, there is not even a projector. The PSL workshop is about simulations, observations, and reflections, while solving hard problems with others. This is multichannel communication. This is experiential learning.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it! Jerry Weinberg wrote the book Introduction to General Systems Thinking and I know that he as well as the other leaders on this course are people that apply systems thinking.

We have many interesting initiatives in Sweden; I have written about Tällberg Foundation earlier. We also have the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which was started in January 2007. It is an international centre that focuses on research for governance of social-ecological systems with a special emphasis on resilience. The term social-ecological means that humans  must be seen as a part of, not apart from, nature.

What is resilience? Wikipedia says:

Resilience is the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.

Stockholm Resilience Centre defines it this way:

Resilience refers to the capacity of a social-ecological system both to withstand perturbations from for instance climate or economic shocks and to rebuild and renew itself afterwards.

A resilient system is prepared for change and can deal with it and survive. It bounces back after challenges and shocks. Its goals are sustainability. Nature is designed this way.

Most of our man-made systems have developed in the other direction. We desire efficiency, maximized production and monetary profit. Diversity is suffocated. Healthy buffering is removed and just-in-time is what counts. The result is short-sightedness. We get fragile and nervous systems. In economical turbulence, when one fall – many others fall. We have to identify the dangerous policies and exchange them for resilient policies, whether it be in the social, economical or any area.

Stockholm Resilience Centre have a lot of interesting videos at their site, many interviews and some seminars. For example, have a look at an interview with Buzz Holling, a well-known researcher on this subject.

I have been busy the last weeks studying. Every minute I could spare during the holidays I would jump into the System Dynamics course and work with modelling. It’s so incredibly interesting! I decided that I didn’t want to stay on the level of just knowing about systems thinking and appreciating a fine theory. I wanted to go deeper and get my hands dirty with system models. I believe that not until you have wrestled with dependencies, feedbacks and non-linearities and tried to describe their behaviour and consequences, you begin to realize the true meaning of  a system.

I have worked with growth models and spent some hours fiddling with exponential simulations and suddenly I realized that I had not understood the impact of exponential growth. We look at an exponential curve and really see and act as though it was a linear one, with sometimes disastrous consequences. Most of us are untrained when it comes to complexities and feedback, how the world really works and this is reflected in the policies that are made.