I was once consulted by a semiconductor equipment maker who wanted to reduce their service maintenance costs.  The client team offered a variety of ideas, some of which were workforce-related and could be implemented fairly rapidly, while other options involved...

By Kenneth G. Cooper (Moderator’s Note: After several recent conversations with Ken about different dimensions of SD in medical research, and as a follow-up to his recent post, I asked him to provide a short list of the top reasons why we should pursue more SD work in...

By Kenneth G. Cooper It is within our capability to reduce dramatically the long time and high cost of successful drug development for treating human disease. We can do so by adding to medical research the analysis of the elegantly complex, feedback-intensive systems...

By Jack Homer, VP of Professional Practice I recently received an e-mail from a college student, someone I’d never heard of before, wondering whether system dynamics was the right approach for studying a particular issue: how the government’s publication of secondary...

By Jack Homer, VP of Professional Practice In the Odyssey, the ancient Greek epic poem of adventure and personal insight, we meet Mentor, a wise old friend of the family whose name means “mental strength”, and who gives crucial guidance to Telemachus, the son of...

By John Sterman, Jay W. Forrester Professor of ManagementDirector, MIT System Dynamics Group Last summer we published a special issue of System Dynamics Review celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the field.  It included my introductory paper, “System...

By Jack Homer, VP of Professional Practice Let me start by introducing myself, for those who don’t know me.  I’ve been involved in system dynamics since the late 1970s, got my PhD at MIT in 1983, and have been a full-time independent SD consultant since 1990.  I live...

By Martin Schaffernicht, 2019 President of the System Dynamics Society A conference is “a formal meeting of people with a shared interest, typically one that takes place over several days” and “an event, sometimes lasting a few days, at which there is a group of talks...

Dear fellow members of the System Dynamics Society, In late 2003, I attended my first system dynamics conference. It was the first Latin American system dynamics conference – upon becoming a member of the System Dynamics Society earlier that year, I had received a...

Dear Friends: As we are in the holiday season and approaching the New Year, I want to take this opportunity to share a few thoughts with you regarding all that the System Dynamics Society accomplished in the past year. 2018 was a milestone transition year in the...