When Jay Wright Forrester published his first paper in 1958, he subtitled it “a major breakthrough for decision-makers.” At the time, some thought of this as rather an exaggeration if not pompous. Now that 50 years of system dynamics (SD) has elapsed, we can at least point to the achievements made and restate continuing progress in the pages of this section. Was it a “major breakthrough”? It certainly has the potential to raise the standards in evidence-based policy making to warrant this description and some startlingly good examples of such work will be mentioned here. But after 50 years perhaps one might expect more than has surfaced heretofore.
The key might be connected to the skills required to formulate good SD models – those which address a real-world problem with devastating simplicity and insight. It is deceptively easy to produce an SD model, but there are subtleties involved in producing a really effective model for policy purposes. An uplift in modeling skills is something...
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Dangerfield, B. (2013). System Dynamics, Introduction to. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_538-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_538-3
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Latest
System Dynamics: Introduction- Published:
- 10 August 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_538-4
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System Dynamics, Introduction to- Published:
- 28 March 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27737-5_538-3