Update on the system dynamics course
January 13, 2009 | 8:36 pmI 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.
I whole-heartedly agree. It takes just a little modeling to start to see the incredibly important dynamics that are in play all around us. I took a course last year in Portland State’s System Science program on systems dynamics. It really opened my eyes.
I was, however, thoroughly unimpressed with the tools that we used to explore these things. My professor challenged me to build a better solution. I’ve included that challenge in a large, and still not fully released open-source project, Tegu. Learning to build that better system has asked me to look even more deeply into the relations between things. One of these days Tegu will have a great system dynamics library in it.
Maybe you’d care to write an article about the approaches your taking to systems dynamics? I have your RSS on a reader that I regularly review (life.teguhub.com), and I’d love to see how other people are approaching the problem.
David,
Interesting to hear about Tegu. Can I find it somewhere? When first looking for tools I did a quick scan, but didn’t find any open source software. Perhaps I was too quick. What in particular didn’t you like with Vensim?
Yes, I definitively plan to write more. And I would like to discuss more…
/Anders