Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

11 System Dynamics

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing the ‘structures’ that underlie complex situations, and for discerning high from low leverage change …. Ultimately, it simplifies life by helping us to see the deeper patterns lying beneath the events and the details

(Senge 1990, p. 69)

11.1 Prologue

In 1968, a group of prominent international politicians, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders met in Rome to discuss the present and future “predicament of mankind.” Their conviction was that the problems facing mankind were so complex and interrelated that they were beyond the scope of traditional institutions and individual policies and needed to be studied and addressed as “a whole.” This led them to find a multidisciplinary think‐tank that became known as the “Club of Rome.” One of the Club's earliest initiatives was to commission an international team of researchers, centered on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, to produce a model that described the behavior of the different but interrelated components that make up “the global system.” To achieve this, the 17 researchers employed the global model and system dynamics (SD) approach set out by Jay Forrester in his book World Dynamics (1971a). Their report, known as The Limits to Growth (1972), sent shock waves around the world. Its foremost conclusion stated starkly that:

If the present growth trends in world ...