Systems Dynamics in Education: Systems Thinking and Systems Dynamics |
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By Mario deSantis, February 28, 1999 |
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The feeling I sensed as I began
to study the conceptual framework and educational applications of - Systems Dynamics was a repeat of what I felt when in 1995 I read the book "The Fifth Discipline" - by Peter Senge. |
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personal |
I remember that Senge introduced the management philosophy of the Learning Organization
as a possible fad, such as Quality Circles and Total Quality Management (TQM). Thomas
Stewart(1) - made fun of the proliferation of such management fads and in one of his Fortune Magazine's - articles he mentioned that there was even a fad denouncing other fads. Notwithstanding this - skepticism about management fads, as I finished the reading of "The Fifth Discipline", I found - an encouraging sense of relief by being able to understand that business, social or economic life - must not be founded on the all pervasive artificial and Darwinian premise of the survival of the fittest(2). Senge describes the Learning Organization as made up of the four disciplines: - personal mastery, shared vision, mental models, team learning; and I felt and expressed the - thought that these disciplines, taken together, were composing a universal understanding for - increasing our capacity to be individually and collectively creative in the pursuing of shared - societal visions. Senge defines Systems Thinking as the Fifth Discipline, that is the discipline - that integrates all the others in a balancing mode and that reminds us that the "whole" can exceed - the sum of its parts. |
learning is |
Systems Thinking is therefore the ability to understand the interconnectedness of
our social - systems as defined by human decisions. In a more generalized way, System Thinking is the - ability to see things or systems as wholes rather than made up of different individual parts. - The Learning Organization is therefore a Systems Thinking organization where learning is - practised in order to enhance our capacity to create and where Learning is appreciated as an - intrinsic need of being human, and as Bill O'Brien of Hannover Insurance says, learning is - "...as fundamental to human beings as the sex drive..."( The Fifth Discipline, page 14) |
Our social organizations |
In previous articles(3) (4)
I mentioned that our politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders are - unable to understand the complex and interactive behaviour of our social organizations, and they address problems by making "linear thinking"(5) decisions based on simple "cause effect" - relationships among the immediately perceived problematic events. Our social organizations - and systems are complex and all of their subparts and related actions are interconnected, in - time and geography, and characterized by the so called "feedback" and "looping" behaviour. - These complex systems are called dynamic systems because their structure and behaviour - change over time. The practice of the discipline of Systems Thinking is invaluable for learning - the complex behaviour of our social dynamic systems, however, Systems Thinking by itself - cannot overcome our cognitive limitations to keep track of the looping behaviour of the multitude events and variables making up the systems. And this is why Jay Forrester(6) developed the - field of System Dynamics. |
replicate real life systems by compressing time and geography for the study of their behaviour |
System Dynamics is a unifying approach for the comprehensive analysis of complex
- organizations. System Dynamics is based on the computer mathematical modelling of - these organizations and on the consequential study of their behaviour over time through - simulation runs, where a simulation run is the dynamic study of the computer model for - a given set of mathematical equations defining the organization. System Dynamics is a - universal method to study complex systems, I say universal, because it uses the - comprehensive discipline of Systems Thinking, the economic availability of computer - modelling resources, because it is interdisciplinary, and above all, because it is the only - approach able to replicate real life systems by compressing time and geography for the study - of their behaviour. Mathematical models are very limited in describing complex systems - with feedback loops, and they are no match for System Dynamics; and since this latter - approach is inherently interdisciplinary, wholesome, interative, and participative, System - Dynamics is the only answer in the search for a unifying and systemic framework to - restructure our compartmentalized educational systems. |
Endnotes: |
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Thomas Stewart is the author of "Intellectual CAPITAL: The New Wealth of Organizations", Doubleday/Currency, 1997. http://members.aol.com/thosstew/bio.html | |
Coping with changes: an overview of the Learning Organization, Knowledge Economy and current practices in Information Technology applications, by Mario deSantis, June 1997. Refer to endnote 16: a personal story. http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/desam/paper-coping_changes.htm | |
Systems Dynamics in Education: An Introduction, by Mario deSantis, February 13, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News | |
Systems Dynamics in Education: Thinking Differently, by Mario deSantis, February 20, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News | |
The paradox of this Linear Thinking mentality has been described by the saying that "nine women can't make a baby in one month" | |
Jay W. Forrester is Germeshausen Professor Emeritus and Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology http://sysdyn.mit.edu/people/jay-forrester.html |