How to Sell System Dynamics: Sales as a Process vs. Sales as a Personality
11 am NY | 4 pm London | 12 am Beijing | Time Converter
How to Sell System Dynamics: Sales as a Process vs. Sales as a Personality
In this seminar, Timothy clarifies how selling System Dynamics is less about having a sales personality than it is about following a process known as a sales pipeline. This seminar is designed for startups, early-career contractors, or other practitioners slogging through the business development cycle of landing System Dynamics contracts. Additionally, the concept and application of a sales pipeline are transferable to other applications of System Dynamics: grad school or grant applications, employment pursuits, and even publication.
About the Speaker
Timothy Clancy (Tim) is the founder of Dialectic Simulations Consulting, LLC a firm focused on delivering systems thinking and simulation capabilities to public, private, and non-profit 500 clients. Tim’s career in consulting spans over 25 years, including 10 years at IBM, where he was deeply involved in both business development and delivery. Tim has a Ph.D. in System Dynamics from WPI.
Q&A Session: From Problem Selection to Modeling and Career Development
9 am NY | 2 pm London | 3 pm Central Europe | 10 pm Beijing | Time Converter
Bridging Two Worlds: Academia and Practitioners
Joint Seminar Series – System Dynamics Society & UiB MINDS
The Society and UiB Minds invite you to a series of four webinars with the goal of sharing experiences and perspectives from renowned professionals in the field of System Dynamics. MINDS (Mentoring in New Dimensions) is the student-led peer mentoring initiative within the System Dynamics Group at the University of Bergen. The initiative seeks to contribute towards knowledge-sharing and expanding horizons, as well as providing a platform for networking between past and current System Dynamicists.
From Problem Selection to Modeling and Career Development
A Q&A session with Mohammad Jalali. An interactive event where the audience is the main driver of the talk. Questions from all directions, from how to choose a good dynamic problem to career development.
Mohammad S. Jalali (MJ) is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and works on data science and simulation-based approaches to help policymakers develop effective policies. He works with decision-makers, does fieldwork, and collects data to inform his models and analyses. Since 2019, he has received over $5 million in grant funding and his work has been featured in several publications. He has also held several editorial positions and has received multiple awards for his work. Before joining Harvard, he was a research faculty at MIT Sloan and a consultant at the World Bank.
How Food and System Dynamics Gave me a Career
10 am NY | 3 pm London | 4 pm Central Europe | 10 pm Beijing | Time Converter
Bridging Two Worlds: Academia and Practitioners
Joint Seminar Series – System Dynamics Society & UiB MINDS
The Society and UiB Minds invite you to a series of four webinars with the goal of sharing experiences and perspectives from renowned professionals in the field of System Dynamics. MINDS (Mentoring in New Dimensions) is the student-led peer mentoring initiative within the System Dynamics Group at the University of Bergen. The initiative seeks to contribute towards knowledge-sharing and expanding horizons, as well as providing a platform for networking between past and current System Dynamicists.
How Food and System Dynamics Gave me a Career
A discussion of two System Dynamics projects that had some real impact and then reflect on how this happened, and what needs to be in place for us system dynamicists to have an impact.
Birgit Kopainsky is a systems thinker and modeler who studies the role of System Dynamics analysis and modeling in facilitating transformation processes in social-ecological systems. She aims to provide guidelines for understanding complex dynamic systems and making information on climate change, agriculture, and food security accessible and relevant for action. She works in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa and engages with a wide range of stakeholders to achieve breakthrough moments of understanding and promote change toward resilience and sustainability. She currently works as a full-time professor at the University of Bergen for the Master’s program in System Dynamics.
Documenting The Modeling Process
Building a simulation model requires lots of information to be gathered. This information comes in many formats such as flip charts, pictures, emails, and spreadsheets. How should this information be stored so that it is easily recalled and shared for months or even years after being collected? The authors of the recent System Dynamics Review article “Documenting the modeling process with a standardized data structure described and implemented in DynamicVu” propose that adopting a standardized data structure is the first step. This presentation will describe such a data structure and then focus on the many advantages of documenting the modeling process with such a structure, including a demonstration of an online database specifically designed for documenting the process of building a simulation model called DynamicVu.
About the Speakers
Warren Farr is currently working with business owners and managers to increase productivity and to plan confidently. Warren combines simulation modeling with data transparency to create understanding. Intuitive access to data using insightful database design is often a part of the solution. To organize the information collected to inform and build simulation models, Warren developed DynamicVu, a secure web-enabled application. During his career, Warren spent 20 years as President/CEO of Refrigeration Sales Corporation, a midwest wholesaler of heating, ventilating, air conditioning, and refrigeration equipment, parts, and supplies. Through long-term planning, technology adoption, and process improvement, the business grew from $50M to over $120M without increasing the employee count. Prior to RSC, Warren held various product design, engineering, and sales positions in the growing computer networking industry of the 1980s and 1990s, including The MITRE Corporation in Boston. Warren obtained his Bachelor of Science degree as well as his MBA degree from Duke University. Warren obtained his Master of Science in System Dynamics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Warren’s career has been spent designing and operating complex systems: mechanical, electrical, and social. Since 2000, System Dynamics has provided him with a robust way of describing, understanding, and improving important systems. Warren is an active member of the International System Dynamics Society.
Samuell D. Allen is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In his dissertation research, he’s studying supply chain sustainability from a strategy and operations management theory development perspective. Samuell also studies complex health services and quality improvement situations. In these efforts, he specializes in the application of innovative methods for leveraging qualitative data and theoretical resources to develop and evaluate causal loop diagrams and simulation models.
Andrada Tomoaia-Cotisel is a Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation and Professor of Policy Analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She teaches and mentors Ph.D. students in mixed-methods approaches to system dynamics modeling and systems thinking. She received her Ph.D. in Health Services Research & Policy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She specializes in developing and applying formal methods bringing the strengths of qualitative and quantitative data to improve conceptualization and validation. Her current work explores dynamic complexity in health service delivery, implementation, and outcomes, as well as the influence of context and resulting variation.
Data & Uncertainty in System Dynamics
Jay Forrester cautioned that “fitting curves to past system data can be misleading”. Certainly, that can be true, if the model is deficient. But we can have our cake and eat it too: a good model that passes traditional System Dynamics quality checks and fits the data can yield unique insights. This talk will discuss how data, calibration optimization, Kalman filtering, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Bayesian inference, and sensitivity analysis work together. The emphasis will be on practical implementation with a few examples from real projects, and pointers to resources.
Using all available information, from informal estimates to time series data, yields the best possible estimate of the state of a system and its uncertainty. That makes it possible to construct policies that are robust not just to a few indicator scenarios, but to a wide variety of plausible futures. Even if you don’t use the full suite of available tools, there’s much to be gained from a simple application of eyeball calibration, traditional reference modes as pseudo-data, and exploratory sensitivity analysis.
About the Speaker
Tom Fiddaman is the CTO of Ventana Systems and part of the development team for Vensim and Ventity. He created the Markov Chain Monte Carlo implementation in Vensim that facilitates Bayesian inference in System Dynamics models. He got his start in environmental models and simulation games, and worked on Fish Banks, updates to Limits to Growth, and early versions of C-ROADS and En-ROADS. Tom worked on data-intensive projects in a variety of settings, including consumer goods supply chains, mental health delivery systems, pharmaceutical marketing, state COVID-19 policy, and recently Chronic Wasting Disease in deer.
Multisolving: Working With Complexity and Interconnection
August, 31 at 11 am New York | 4 pm London | 11 pm Beijing (check your local time) Climate change. Biodiversity loss. Racial, gender, and economic inequity. Global pandemic and other health crises. Each of these challenges is serious on its own, but they also interact. Inaction on one crisis can erode gains in another, as when climate impacts threaten gains in health, well-being, or development. And sometimes an apparent solution to one crisis can worsen others, as when environmental protections were loosened in some countries to try to counteract pandemic-related economic slowdowns. But the same interconnections that lead to cascading crises also open up the possibility of synergistic solutions. Multisolving focuses on these possibilities – instances where the same intervention can yield multiple benefits. This one-hour webinar will share bright spots of multisolving from around the world. We’ll also explore the obstacles to multisolving, and how systems thinking and systems tools can help people overcome these obstacles. The webinar will also introduce the Multisolving Institute, which was launched earlier this year, and may be familiar to some members of the System Dynamics Society from its roots in the Multisolving Program at Climate Interactive.
About the Speaker
Elizabeth Sawin is the Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute. Beth is an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of ‘multisolving’ to help people see and create the conditions for such win-win-win solutions. Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership in complex systems for both national and international audiences. Her work has been published widely, including in Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, U. S. News, The Daily Climate, and System Dynamics Review. She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders in the Donella Meadows Fellows Program and provided systems thinking training to both Ashoka and Dalai Lama Fellows. Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists. Beth is also a member of the advisory board of the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change Health and Equity Program. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth co-founded Climate Interactive in 2010 and served as Climate Interactive’s Co-Director from 2010 until 2021. While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2008. Beth also led Climate Interactive’s efforts to integrate measures of equity, health, and well-being into decision support tools and computer simulations. Beth trained in system dynamics and sustainability with Donella Meadows and worked at Sustainability Institute, the research institute founded by Meadows, for 13 years. She has two adult daughters and lives in rural Vermont where she and her husband grow as much of their own food as they can manage.
Using System Dynamics to Teach and Learn about COVID 19
This Webinar is free due to the generous contribution of the University at Albany and California State University, Chico
The COVID Pandemic constituted a dynamic and complex problem challenging leaders and managers to design policies facing difficult questions such as:
- Do we still need to wear masks?
- Should the government mandate wearing masks?
- What happens if everyone does (or does not) get vaccinated?
- When will the next surge happen?
- How do we know if the pandemic is over?
Systems thinking and simulation provide tools and methods to explore these important questions with a variety of audiences. Learn how a team of experts is using System Dynamics to help different audiences to answer these questions:
- Using a case-based System Dynamics simulation to explore policy choices in an undergraduate public policy capstone course.
- Using a set of self-paced learning modules to build a simulation model from the ground up.
Ali N. Mashayekhi is a retired professor of management from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran where he taught System Dynamics and strategic management. He received his BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University and his Ph.D. in System Dynamics from MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts.
Babak Bahaddin works as an associate consultant at isee systems. Babak holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Information Science, from the University at Albany, State University of New York.
Daniel Gordon trained in System Dynamics at Rockefeller College, the State University of New York at Albany. He is retired from the New York State Health Department, where he spent 34 years working in health care policy analysis and HIV epidemiology.
David Andersen is Professor Emeritus in Public Administration and Information Science at the University at Albany – SUNY. He is a former President and Vice President for Finance for the System Dynamics Society as well as a winner of the Forrester Award.
Hyunjung Kim is a professor of management at California State University, Chico. She teaches strategy and management courses using system dynamics. She received her Ph.D. in Public Administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany.
Luis Felipe Luna-Reyesis a Professor of Public Administration and Policy at the University at Albany and a National Academy of Public Administration Fellow. His research is at the intersection of Public Administration, Information Systems, and Systems Sciences.
New Horizons of Systems Science
NEW HORIZONS OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE
Systems theory is developing to include new perspectives with a focus on integrated and inclusive transdisciplinary system approaches. This panel will discuss new advances in systems science including critical systems thinking, social/socio-technical systems, complex systems, which come together in the systems engineering principles. We will also discuss where Systems Dynamics fits into this picture as well as other types of systems models.
Erika Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Cornell Systems Engineering Program. She is the founder and chair of the Social Systems Working Group (SocWG) at the International Council for Systems Engineering (INCOSE); the Americas lead for Empowering Women Leaders in Systems Engineering (EWLSE) at INCOSE and represents Cornell on INCOSE’s Academic Council.
Michael D. Watson is the chair of the INCOSE Complex Systems Working Group and chair of the Systems Engineering Principles Action Team. He is the Technical Advisor in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Advanced Concepts Office. He graduated with a BSEE from the University of Kentucky in 1987 and obtained his MSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1996) and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2005) from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Javier Calvo-Amodio is an Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering at Oregon State University; Chair of the Systems Science Working Group at INCOSE and Deputy Editor of Systems Research and Behavioral Science Journal. His research focus is on developing a fundamental understanding of how to integrate systems science into industrial and systems engineering research and practice to enable better engineering purposeful human activity systems.
The Food Packaging Problem: A Food System Problem, not a Packaging Problem
7 pm New York | 12 am London | 9 am (April 07) Sydney (check your local time)
The reliance on packaging in food systems is a global challenge.
The increased use of food packaging is causing several negative environmental impacts, such as ocean pollution, freshwater, and land contamination. Improved waste management and recycling schemes remain the main response to this challenge. Whilst useful, current efforts overlook the importance of a systemic understanding of the problem. Current interventions fail because they tackle the symptoms of the problem and not the drivers.
This webinar explores from a system perspective the role that food packaging plays in modern society. The growth-driven globalized food economy and time-deprived society are responsible for the dependence on food packaging. The presentation sheds light on the mental models driving the system and leverage points able to reduce modern food packaging addiction.
About the Speaker
Sabrina Chakori holds a BSc. in Biology (University of Geneva), an MSc. in Environmental Economics (The University of Queensland), and she is currently finishing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. research that explores food packaging reduction in food systems. Sabrina is a passionate systems modeler (systems thinking, System Dynamics, network analysis). She believes that systems approaches are crucial to understanding and tackling current socio-ecological wicked problems.
For more than a decade, Sabrina has been advocating for a more sustainable society, leading numerous collaborations in various countries across Europe, Kenya, Ecuador, Mexico, and Australia, including an initiative with Queensland’s Environment Minister to introduce the law banning single-use plastic bags. Sabrina is convinced that to solve the interlinked social and ecological crisis we need to change the roots of our economy, shifting away from the growth-driven system. To translate into practice her knowledge and vision, in 2017, she founded the Brisbane Tool Library, a social enterprise that encourages people to borrow tools, camping gear, and other equipment. This community-driven circular economy model reduces productivism and consumerism. The Brisbane Tool Library is Australia’s first and only ‘library of things’ to be located within a public library – State Library of Queensland.
Sabrina is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and, in 2021, she has been selected as Post Growth Institute fellow. Winner of the 2020 Create Change: 7 News Young Achiever Award (QLD) and recipient of the Emerging Female Leader bursary from the National Council of Women of Queensland (2020), Sabrina is a multi-award social entrepreneur, researcher, educator, and most of all activist. Sabrina is fully invested in creating systemic change that would build a more socially just and ecologically sustainable post-growth society.
How to Publish in The System Dynamics Review: The Society Journal
In this webinar, we’ll have an overview of the System Dynamics Review – the academic and scientific journal of our community. You’ll learn about its growing positive performance and impact. We’ll review the process of submitting, revising, and eventually publishing your manuscripts in the Journal, including some tips on what works and what doesn’t work. There should be ample time at the end of the seminar to answer the questions of the participants.
Andreas Größler is a full professor at the Operations Management Department at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, teaching in undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs. Andreas is the Executive Editor of the System Dynamics Review and holds several other leading positions in academic associations, including in the European Operations Management Association, the System Dynamics Society, and the Society for Business and Social Cybernetics. His research focuses on operations strategy, behavioral operations management, and System Dynamics.