There's actually more to filling a swimming pool with water than you might realize.

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

Consider the following "Sustaining the Forest" model intended to provide another example of how unexpected the behavior of a web of extended interactions can be.

This model is derived from the paper "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement" by Nelson P. Repenning and John D Sterman. See Insight 752 for a causal loop version of this model.

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New Learning tend to reduce Outdated Thinking, Communicating & Learning though our Outdated Thinking, Communicating & Learning inhibits new learning. The question is then how do we break this cycle. Adopted from "An Introduction to Systems Thinking with STELLA" by Barry Richmond.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

The structure responsible for rabbit population growth.

All the following have a common characteristic.

The model construction process is actually a balancing loop which endeavors to employ an abstract version of real events to form a model which produces conclusions and behavior which mimic the real events.

There's actually more to filling a swimming pool with water than you might realize.

Consider the following "Sustaining the Forest" model intended to provide another example of how unexpected the behavior of a web of extended interactions can be.

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

What do activities of these images have in common?

The structure responsible for rabbit population growth.

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

The Home Heating System can be used to demonstrate how we get caught in dilemmas and become victims of ourselves.

All the following have a common characteristic.

When endeavoring to develop an understanding of the nature of something it is generally useful to create a model of some type to aid in surfacing that understanding.

Consider the following "Sustaining the Forest" model intended to provide another example of how unexpected the behavior of a web of extended interactions can be.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

This common archetype of systems that include relapse or recidivism allows exploration of the unintended effects of increasing upstream capacity and swamping downstream capacity. The increase in the relapse rate eventually returns to swamp upstream capacity as well. A social welfare example, based on a TANF case study, from How Small System Dynamics Models Can Help the Policy Process. N. Ghaffarzadegan, J. Lyneis, GP Richardson. System Dynamics Review 27,1 (2011) 22-44 Conference version at http://bit.ly/HlxtZj

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.