Leverage points to march “upward from the aimless plateau”

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/sdr Professor Forrester’s paper, “System dynamics—the next fifty years” (Forrester, 2007) offers many provocative observations and tough challenges. This paper (and the speech upon which it is based) strikes a few dramatic themes throughout: (1) Many people doing system dynamics work have “only a superficial and unworkable preview of the potential of the field” mainly because they “enter the field without the training that would allow them to reach the full potential.” (2) Yielding to academic pressures, qualified system dynamicists write to satisfy narrow academic interests only, “retreating from major real-world issues”; there are no recent books/activity on important policy issues, addressed to the public. (3) Largely due to (1) and (2) above, “System dynamics is still far from reaching the quality of work to which we should be aspiring . . . we should consider the possibility that work in the field is declining in average quality” and “. . . the need to begin debating how to raise quality and scope in applications, published papers, and especially in academic programs.” The above claims are quite radical, provocative and are particularly courageous, considering the fact that they are expressed by the founder of the field. After all, Prof. Forrester argues that most of us are unqualified, poor modelers, turning out low-quality models of problems that have no relevance to the real world! This is quite dramatic, given the fact that modeling is essentially what (we think) we do. I personally agree with the general sense of the above three observations. But when it comes to causes, consequences and potential cures for these problems, I have a few complementary items to add and also some disagreements. In this brief note, I will suggest a few potential leverage points and also comment on a couple of points of disagreement.