vesterberg.se

I found an interesting course at the MIT web called Applications of System Dynamics spring 2004.

This is the course description:

… a project-based course that explores how organizations can use system dynamics to achieve important goals. In small groups, students learn modeling and consulting skills by working on a term-long project with real-life managers. A diverse set of businesses and organizations sponsor class projects, from start-ups to the Fortune 500. The course focuses on gaining practical insight from the system dynamics process, and appeals to people interested in system dynamics, consulting, or managerial policy-making.

The course shows a process for using system dynamics to solve problems. Prof Jim Hines calls it the standard method, because it is the approach used by most SD (system dynamics) practitioners. The course shows how you can plan you work and how to organize your meetings with your client week by week. He uses a fictitious case all the way up to the final Vensim model and even supplies suggestions for power-point presentations to the client.

His approach briefly looks like this:
1) Problem definition: list of variables, reference modes, problem statement
2) Momentum policies
3) Dynamic hypotheses
4) Model first loop
5) Analyze first loop
6) Model second loop
7) Analyze second loop
Etc.

The interesting thing about this resource is the generous online lecture notes. I found the guidelines (pdf) very useful because of the practical advice therein and I will definitively use the guidelines as a starting template when doing consultant work in the future The entire course material can be downloaded here.

There is another SD course at MIT OpencourseWare called System Dynamics for Business Policy. It uses Sterman’s book Business Dynamics as textbook and does not have extra lecture notes. You can download the assignments of the course and they might be of some interest.

Peter Senge, a well-known professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational learning (SoL) was interviewed in Jakarta Post recently.

We got two curves that are creating big problems. One is the growing interdependence of the world…and a diminishing capacity to understand interdependence.The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

So if you deal with tribal cultures, prior to the agricultural revolution, many of them don’t even have a sense of themselves as separate from nature. They usually don’t have even a word for nature. You don’t have a word from something that’s not separate from you.

Agrarian societies developed a slightly different attitude, believing it was humans who initiate the “natural” systems, which were often highly religious, and that humans are separate and superior.

During the industrial revolution and the subsequent urbanization process, human beings began to ignore nature. “There’s a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.”

The further people are from nature, the more they lost the ability to understand interdependence. “Nature is our teacher to understanding interdependence

Other posts about this subject you might want to read:
The partnership paradigm
Ishmael
The necessity of diversity
Connecting to nature

In an interesting article in Culture Change called “Living now, naturally and sustainably via relocalizing“, Dave Ewoldt traces the root of our global crisis back to a fundamental disconnection from the natural world.

He describes the dominator paradigm that our industrial civilization has been built upon.

The systemic root of our disconnection from nature can be directly traced to the dominator paradigm which started conquering and subverting egalitarian cultures 6-8,000 years ago, and was firmly ensconced by 2,000 BC. As detailed by author Riane Eisler, this paradigm consists of force-based ranking hierarchies of control (humans over nature, men over women, one race over another) that are built on and maintained by fear.

In this paradigm individualism reigns and “the others” are thought of as inferior and thus morally acceptable to exploit for personal profit. We in our civilization, even assume that we must use this control for the sake of human progress and prosperity.

The root has to be removed. A fundamental change of paradigm is needed.  The antidote is to reconnect with nature in a systemic way.

Healthy ecosystems can be looked to for providing the models and metaphors humans require for becoming sustainable and creating mutually supportive relationships.

Sustainability is a key. The author defines it as

integrating our social and economic lives into the environment in ways that tend to enhance or maintain ecosystems rather than degrade or destroy them; a moral imperative to pass on our natural inheritance, not necessarily unchanged, but undiminished in its ability to meet the needs of future generations; finding, and staying within, the balance point amongst population, consumption, and waste assimilation where bioregions, watersheds and ecosystems maintain their ability to recharge and regenerate.

The other antidote is to relocalize

In the human built environment and in the social institutions we create, the process to become sustainable — to holistically integrate our activities with the natural world — is provided by a systemic concept known as relocalization. This is the antithesis as well as the antidote to corporate globalization. Relocalization includes the concepts that we must rebuild our local economies to be self-reliant; recapture our sense of place and belonging; reclaim our sovereignty; and restore our communities of mutual support.

The author describes the need to return to local autonomy, to bio-regional networks of interdependence where production and distribution of food, goods, services and energy is as close to the point as consumption as possible. Living organisms have a strong tendency to self-organize into mutually supportive relationships. Nature is resilient and we need to build our society that way.

Using the four core Natural Systems Principles — mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity — to inform the process of relocalization, we can replace the dominator paradigm with a paradigm of partnership, and we can overcome and heal our disconnection and separation from the web of life.

Reconnecting to nature and relocalizing are effective strategies for the future, according to the author. The dominator paradigm should be changed to a partnership paradigm.

Here are some more articles published by Dave Ewoldt.

I believe the main reason we have to start thinking in this direction is that we live embedded in a larger system. Our civilization is part of something bigger, whether we like it or not. We can perhaps create our own rules to a certain extent and for a period of time, but sooner or later the laws of the surrounding system will enforce themselves.

We like to look at things in small and understandable pieces and we trace simple paths from cause to effect. We see the causes of our problems as something “out there”, instead of something “in here”. In reality our band-aid solutions only creates further problems, because our perspective is too narrow. Our only real option is to see ourselves in a bigger context and find out, cooperate with and learn from the surrounding system..

How could relocalizing be expressed concretely for a country or a city? What steps could we take to realize it?

Other posts about this subject you might want to read:
Ishmael
The necessity of diversity
Connecting to nature

One important thing to remember about our mind is that it interprets and colours our perception of the world. We might think that our inner world is a representation of what is out there, that our senses are like a camera displaying images and this is what we experience. But that’s not the case. Science have shown how our perception is deeply coloured by our emotions and preconceptions. This colouring and interpretation happens before we are consciously aware of it. The pathway of a visual image for example goes through parts of the brain that handles emotions and the ability to form concepts.

You might have heard of the experiments when people watch neutral images that are mixed with images with strong emotional content for a very short period of time. This is called subliminal emotional stimulus. The observer is not aware of the mixed-in picture, but they react to it subconsciously. If he afterwards tries to draw what he saw, the mood of his drawing is affected by the mixed-in picture.

You might also have seen those visual illusions where several images are hidden in a single picture. While watching them, our mind subconsciously tries to interpret and fill in what is missing and suddenly we see the image. The mind flips back and forth between possible interpretations.

In the picture to the right, even though we know that the pillars are equal in size, we strongly feel like the rightmost pillar is the longest. Our brain interprets the lines as parallel lines going away in distance from us instead of converging lines on a flat sheet of paper. This is mostly a learned and a cultural behaviour.

Our mind is creating an inner world that is a mix of what is out there and our own ideas and emotions that seem fitting. This happen more rapidly that we can consciously notice. Our mind strives to interpret what we perceive in familiar terms for us to make us feel safe. More often than we realize we see what we expect to see and the unexpected pass unnoticed.

We need to be aware of this behaviour of the mind. When we try to learn new things, this filter is active. When we try to communicate, the difference in interpretations easily leads to misunderstandings. If we are asked to describe facts about an event we often jump to interpretations quickly..

It is quite possible to learn to know your own perception and conceptualization process and recognize more of the “raw” data that comes from your senses. You can train yourself to separate observation from interpretation. You can make regular reflections a frequent habit. Probably you have to slow down your life also.

We live in an information age in which conceptualization is a prominent ingredient and it is deeply rooted. Our lives are crammed with activities and we are easily fooled by mainstream messages. We follow our common “culture” almost blindly. Let’s assume responsibility of our minds and actions.

Other posts about this sbuject you might want to read:
Humanness and conversation
Your thoughts are not you