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Systems Thinking in the Age of Digital Ecosystems

9 am NY | 2 pm London | 3 pm Central Europe | 10 pm Beijing | Time Converter

Systems Thinking in the Age of Digital Ecosystems: Engaging with a Digitalized Sustainability Future 

Traditional organizational structures and cultures are challenged in today’s world where nothing about business is usual anymore. Pandemic outbreaks, human-made environmental disasters, as well as the growing importance of artificial intelligence and new technologies, are forcing a rethink about the “taken as granted” in management. How can Systems Thinking support the call for world-making innovations? 

About The Speaker

Michael von Kutzschenbach is inspired by the concept of sustainability as balancing corporate profits with environmental and social well-being. He believes that true sustainability can only be achieved through understanding different perspectives and working towards common goals. He aligns his daily actions with this approach, after studying Forest and Environmental Sciences, he received a Ph.D. researching informal networks, and currently works as a business mediator, lecturer, and project manager in various organizations in Germany, Norway, and Switzerland. His areas of research are the impacts of digitization on sustainable corporate management and sustainable entrepreneurship. 

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 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.