Without needing to run through the software enclosed in the book, one can easily perceive the dependant causation of a specific problem by following the simple rules expained early on in the book for drawing reinforcing and balancing conditions that drive the causes leading to a specific problem being addressed. By focusing on the software which is enclosed on the CD ROM to develop a problem solving approach, one has to work hard to create a balanced problem and this is not easily done by merely reading the book.
I am considering further training in this aspect to master the topic by taking some more ExecEd courses that John Sterman teaches at MIT Sloan along with Jay Forrester and Peter Senge or even taking the eight week remote learning course offered toward credit at the System Dynamics program at Sloan. I deal with complex IT architectures in my work on a daily basis involving financial, technical and business driven dependencies for Fortune firms.
I use causal looping as taught by John and others at MIT Sloan to understand the path to cut through the complexity and reach an action plan that I can recommend to my clients. The book has helped me tremendously in my work in the last few months that I have been reading it on airplane trips between my office and customer offices.
There are several excellent software packages designed to support system dynamics modeling. These include ithink, Powersim, and Vensim. The CD and website include the models for the text in all three software formats. The disk also includes fully functional versions of the ithink, Powersim, and Vensim software so you can run the models using any of these packages without having to purchase any additional software.
The book can be used as a text in courses on systems thinking, simulation modeling, complexity, strategic thinking, operations, and industrial engineering, among others. It can be used in full or half-semester courses, executive education, and self-study. The book also serves as a reference for managers, engineers, consultants, and others interested in developing their systems thinking skills or using system dynamics in their organizations.
A Note on Mathematics. System dynamics is grounded in control theory and the modern theory of nonlinear dynamics. There is an elegant and rigorous mathematical foundation for the theory and models we develop. System dynamics is also designed to be a practical tool that policy makers can use to help them solve the pressing problems they confront in their organizations. Most managers have not studied nonlinear differential equations or even calculus, or have forgotten it if they did.
To be useful, system dynamics modeling must be accessible to the widest range of students and practicing managers without becoming a vague set of qualitative tools and unreliable generalizations.
That tension is compounded by the diversity of backgrounds within the community of managers, students, and scholars interested in system dynamics, backgrounds ranging from people with no mathematics education beyond high school to those with doctorates in physics. This book presents system dynamics with a minimum of mathematical formalism.
The goal is to develop your intuition and conceptual understanding, without sacrificing the rigor of the scientific method. You do not need calculus or differential equations to understand the material.
Indeed, the concepts are presented using only text, graphs, and basic algebra. Mathematical details and references to more advanced material are set aside in separate sections and footnotes. Higher mathematics, though useful, is not as important as the critical thinking skills developed here. Realistic and useful models are almost always of such complexity and nonlinearity that there are no known analytic solutions, and many of the mathematical tools you have studied have limited applicability.
This book will help you use your strong technical background to develop your intuition and conceptual understanding of complexity and dynamics. Modeling human behavior differs from modeling physical systems in engineering and the sciences. We cannot put managers up on the lab bench and run experiments to determine their transfer function or frequency response.
0コメント