What's the real difficulty associated with managing time?

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

The purpose of this model is to have the user change the value of stocks, flows and converters to experience a variety of different graphical results. Understanding this generic model is important pre-requisite to learning about intravenous drugs in the body, radioactivity, self-esteem, water flowing from a drain and many other basic natural systems.

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 interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

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

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.

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

To develop insights regarding a situation of interest there are a number of things should be considered to ensure a view of the relevant influences.

Original Insight (#1366) by Gene Bellinger

What do activities of these images have in common?

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

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

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

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.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

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

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.

There are about fifteen known archetypes with an interesting set of relationships among them.

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Simplest Innovation diffusion model from Sterman's Business Dynamics Ch 9

This is a model depicting the interactions of the Aesop's Fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

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.