What's the real difficulty associated with managing time?

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.

Diagram from a paper by James B. Rieley entitled "The Euro Financial Crisis: Making Sense of the Mess".

CLD of Eric Wolstenholme Syst. Dyn. Rev. 23, 371–389, (2007) See IM-1008 for a stock flow version.

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.

As long as A and B are equally successful everything will remain stable. Though if either A or B receive more resources than the other, or A or B is more successful than the other, the imbalance will result in greater success of A or B accordingly and promote even more success of the one that demonstrates greater success.

A Growth and Underinvestment with a Drifting Standard structure is simply an elaborated Growth and Underinvestment structure where the growth inhibitor induces a decline of the standard over time. The real nasty thing about this structure is that the growth inhibitor influence sets up a Reinforcing Loop which even further promotes a drifting of the standard over time.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

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...

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

Developing a strategy for dealing with a situation begins with a description of the situation and the preferred state for today, not in some distant future, and the perceived implications of not doing anything. There is a also a video for this insight.

Use the defined relationships and complete the loops to create a reinforcing and balancing structure. Demonstrate a hubrid version of the causal loop diagram with picdtures employed to depict the various elements of the structure.

This model depicts the high level sector model for the U.S. Economy to be used in contemplating how to assess the health of the economy.

The three common recurring structures.

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

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

This fixes that fail diagram describes how people often address symptoms, but not fundamental causes.  Poke yoke is a design principle that operates in one of two ways.  One is to prevent the defect from occurring, which addresses the source.  This is ideal because there are no defective products to scrap or rework.

The other is one that prevents defective work-in-process from being passed on to the next stage.  This does not prevent the defect from occurring.  There is still the scrap and rework, but it prevents the product from reaching the customer.

Our actions are based on our beliefs and the results of those actions are the basis for our beliefs. The difficulty we create for ourselves is that we make assumptions as to how to interpret the results we select based on our beliefs. As a result we are often operating on a flawed perspective of reality. There is a also a video for this insight.

A Tragedy of the Commons situation exists whenever two or more activities, each, which in order to produce results, rely on a shared limited resource. Results for these activities continue to develop as long as their use of the limited resource doesn't exceed the resource limit. Once this limit is reached the results produced by each activity are limited to the level at which the resource is replenished. As an example, consider multiple departments with an organization using IT resources, until they've exhausted IT capacity.

Based on a sound realization of reality we need an effective approach to dealing with situations which promotes the requisite understanding to develop a strategy that deals appropriately with the situation. A strategy which also is explicitly designed to minimize unintended consequences and puts in place responses to them should they arise.

Thoughts on the growth of the Twitter user community presented as a causal loop diagram.

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

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