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What is System Dynamics?
Quote from Systems Dynamics Society Website
System dynamics is a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems, such as one finds in business and other social systems. In fact it has been used to address practically every sort of feedback system. While the word system has been applied to all sorts of situations, feedback is the differentiating descriptor here. Feedback refers to the situation of X affecting Y and Y in turn affecting X perhaps through a chain of causes and effects. One cannot study the link between X and Y and, independently, the link between Y and X and predict how the system will behave. Only the study of the whole system as a feedback system will lead to correct results.
The methodology
Rarely, is one able to proceed through these steps without reviewing and refining an earlier step. For instance, the first problem identified may only be a symptom of a still greater problem.
The field developed initially from the work of Jay W. Forrester. His seminal book Industrial Dynamics (Forrester 1961) is still a significant statement of philosophy and methodology in the field. Since its publication, the span of applications has grown extensively and now encompasses work in
What is the relationship of System Thinking to System Dynamics?
Systems thinking looks at exactly the same kind of systems from the same perspective. It constructs the same causal loop diagrams. But it rarely takes the additional steps of constructing and testing a computer simulation model, and testing alternative policies in the model.
Learning
Environments
Quote from High Performance Systems Web site
Learning Environments offer, multimedia-rich opportunities for discovery-oriented learning. Students, usually in teams of 2-3, are confronted with some sort of a computer simulation-based performance, or design, challenge. As they work to meet the challenge, students receive “just in time, just what’s needed” coaching to spur them along. Offered in the best Socratic tradition, the coaching catalyze insight rather than hammer home content via lecture. Students emerge from their Learning Environment experiences richer in two ways. First, they gain the discipline/topic-specific knowledge and understanding they’re mandated by state requirements to attain. And, because they gain it in a highly-engaging manner, they assimilate the material more quickly and retain it longer. Second, students develop a set of general critical thinking skills—specifically Systems Thinking skills—that will serve them in good stead in any discipline, and outside the classroom as well!
Systems Thinking
Quote
from Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline"
A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, an influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.
Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard ~to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest prob-lems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been devel-oped over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer , and to help us see how to change them effectively.
Though the tools are new, the underlying worldview is extremely intuitive; experiments with young children show that they learn systems thinking very quickly.