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

All the following have a common characteristic.

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

SystemsWiki's Musings

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 1899 for a simulation of this model.

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

Little Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to Grandma's house. How long will it take?

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

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.

This Loan Cost Model is the second in the series. It takes into account the potential cost of student loans in the case that the student does not manage to graduate college or does not succeed in their career.

• Traditional Career Model
• Savings Model

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

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.

If we pay close attention to our actions and the typical outcomes of those actions it would be evident that there are frequently occurring patterns that develop. And there is a relation between the patterns.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

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 1899 for a simulation of this model and SysNet for a Video.

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.

From Jay Forrester 1971 book World Dynamics, the earlier, simpler version of the World 3 Limits to Growth Model. Adapted by Geoff McDonnell from Mark Heffernan's ithink version at Systemswiki.org.

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.

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

What do activities of these images have in common?

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

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.