System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World

Todays problems often arise as unintended consequences of yesterdays solutions. Social systems often suffer from policy resistance, the tendency for well-intentioned interventions to be defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself. The field of system dynamics, created at MIT in the 1950s by Jay Forrester, is designed to help us learn about the structure and dynamics of the complex systems in which we are embedded, design high-leverage policies for sustained improvement, and catalyze successful implementation and change. Drawing on engineering control theory and the modern theory of nonlinear dynamical systems, system dynamics often involves the development of formal models and management…