It’s been 50 years since Jay Forrester initiated System Dynamics at MIT by. As current President of the System Dynamics Society, I feel greatly privileged to address this international conference at this significant milestone. In my opinion, however, this anniversary should not only serve as a time to reflect on the history of System Dynamics, but also mark the beginning of its future development. In this sense, I believe 2007 should be seen as both a golden anniversary and the year for planning the future of System Dynamics.
In order to draft a work plan for shaping the future of SD, we must first determine our new goals and think about how to achieve them. If we pay adequate attention to the start of the planning phase, the development phase can be conducted more effectively. I sincerely hope that we can prepare a solid work plan for SD this year.
Now, allow me to reflect on some of the more important achievements of System Dynamics over the past 50 years, and at the same time identify some opportunities we need to address in the future.
SD theory and methodology has evolved in both macroscopic and microcosmic aspects, with extensive study of the sustainable development issues in socio-economic-techno-eco complex systems. Studying each kind of complex system using SD combined with some other theories such as Game Theory has allowed us to explore the major social, political, economic, ecological and other problems our world faces and has elevated SD to be one of the most important analytical methodologies available for addressing these problems. Using SD and ST (Systems Thinking, as an important constituent of SD) has significantly improved mankind's abilities to analyze and solve these problems and thereby gives us hope that we can greatly improve quality of life on this planet.
In the early days, the main application of System Dynamics was in industrial management, such as the fluctuation of production and employment, imbalance in resource allocation and market growth to name a few. Since the latter-part of the 1960’s, however, System Dynamics has become widely known for its major contributions to social and economic research. Some of its more significant works include: Industrial Dynamics, Principles of Systems, Urban Dynamics, World Dynamics, The Limits to Growth, Collected Papers of Jay W. Forrester, Economic Cycles, Managerial Applications of System Dynamics, Element of the System Dynamics Method, Corporate Planning and Policy Design: A System Dynamics Approach, Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling with DYNAMO, Groping in the Dark, Introduction to Computer Simulation, Beyond the Limits, Modeling for Learning Organizations and Business Dynamics, etc.
The System Dynamics National Model of the United States, created by Forrester and his team between early 1970s and early 1980s, studied social and economic problems in the US and the Western Countries in a holistic view, and proved the reasons for the existence of the western economic long-wave and some long-existing economic problems.
Since then, System Dynamics has been developing increasingly fast, not only in application, but in theoretical development as well. As I summarized in‘New Progress in Theory and Methodology of System Dynamics’ (in Chinese), System Dynamics has successfully incorporated and absorbed the essences of other systems sciences, such as Dissipative Structure Theory, Synergetics Theory, Disequilibrium Theory and Chaos Theory, at least in China, to study the problems in complex social and economic systems.
System Dynamics, as a scientific subject, has spread throughout the world and finds applications in almost all fields. It is more widely used in regional, national, natural resource and environment protection work and makes great contributions to the research of complex problems. Meanwhile, branches of System Dynamics, such as Organizational Learning and Systems Thinking have come into being and are extensively applied in business administration. Moreover, new developments continue to emerge such as new theories, methodologies and tools for System Dynamics, such as a model combining other methodologies, DSS (Decision Support System) and powerful simulation software.
Here I feel obliged to restate the mission and goal of system dynamics: to improve people’s quality and make a better world for all of us. To achieve this goal, early in the 1970s, Forrester worked to make System Dynamics an available course for American students at high school. This has been a great success as students can improve their comprehension and gain insight into their study work via systems thinking and SD modeling.
Now System Dynamics has grown into a mature field both organizationally and academically. On one hand, System Dynamics Society, formed in 1983, has expanded into a large organization with System Dynamics Chapters, Special Interest Groups and more than 1000 international members.
In addition to the annual international conference of SD Society, another way we working toward realizing the mission of System Dynamics is through regional and international conferences, in which system dynamicists and others all over the world exchange ideas on the development of their fields. In 2005, for instance, the Shanghai System Dynamics and the Disciplines of Management (SD-MS) Conference focused on sustainable development of Asia Pacific. The Conference served as the continuation of the 2005 International Conference, and will be followed by the multi-lateral, multi-discipline and multi-organization conference of SS-MS-SD to be held in Shanghai in 2007. Specialists from SD Society chapters of Asia Pacific and the Santa Fe Institute will host that Conference.
Nevertheless, as a newly developed systems science, System Dynamics inevitably has its shortcomings. Here I would like to mention some of the more important ones that I believe we can and should address over the coming years:
1. Areas of research
As it has been said, less attention has been paid to theoretical research in recent years in SD. In the applied SD field, lack of research focus is another important problem. Too much emphasis has been put on the business application, while important social and economical problems have been ignored and research in some developing countries has been lacking.
As an academic magazine, The SD Review contributes to academic communion and helps to promote the development of SD significantly. But, compared with other international academic magazines (Note 1 & 2), it has less international influence with few people other than SD community reading it. There exist three main reasons. First, the articles published in the SD Review are often so long that each issue can only include 4 or 5 articles. Moreover, such long articles seem to be too difficult for newcomers to this field to read and understand. This might make it less effective in popularizing SD. The second reason is that the SD Review is currently only accessible to SD society members and subscribers. Others can only choose to read SD Review on-line through Wiley InterScience or just download brief editions.
The final reason for its lack of sufficient influence lies in how we evaluate academic achievements. As an international academic organization, the SD Society has many members whose native languages are not English. If the SD Society only takes those achievements written in English into account, perhaps many valuable achievements, written in other languages, have been ignored. .
It is gratifying that membership in our SD Society has reached over 1000. But there is disequilibrium in the distribution of members. According to the latest statistics, our membership is spread among 64 countries, but 82% of the members come from North America & Europe and only 10% members come from the developing countries in Asia and Africa. Even within the same country, disequilibria exist. In the United States, for an example, about 100 members are from Massachusetts (in eastern area) but only about 30 members from California and a couple of members from Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming respectively (in western area).
4. System Dynamics website
As a platform for SD Society members to communicate and access to information, the SD website needs to be improved in content updating and daily maintenance to meet basic requirements.
Now, I would like to make some suggestions as to how we can address these challenges:
If we divide global membership into developed counties (America: A, Europe: E) and developing countries (Asia, Africa, and other countries: O) and take 12 years for a period, the cycle should be A E A O A E A O A E A O. This results in an American president every other year, a European president every four years, and an Other’s president also every four years. Taking the next 25-30 years as the transition, it should gradually transit into an equilibrium distribution of 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 later on.
Others will put other relative unbalanced problems forward to the PC winter meeting.
It’s been asked thousands of times where the new frontier of the 21st century science is. Prof. Forrester said it is the society, economics and management. I totally agree with him. In fact, System Dynamics has always focused on complexity in social, economic and management systems and has contributed a lot to providing realistic solutions to the problems faced in these areas. I am confident that System Dynamics will continue to be one of the most influential sciences in 21st century.
Thank you and I look forward to working with you all in addressing these challenges and extending our success over the second 50 years of SD.
Notes:
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Sorry to reply late since I was out of town for couple of days.
I revisited the System Dynamics Review (SDR) online. I found it is difficult to compare the SDR with other Journals. Especially with those the first class journal. My personal view on this is as follows:
1). Management Science, Harvard Business Review, etc. represent the their subjects, and have their own readers and enough manuscript sources of papers for publications. Those journals publish the papers related to the theory, study methods and applications of management and economics. however, for most readers, System Dynamics (SD) is believed as a methodology. Researchers apply SD for solving their problems.
2). Other journals may only publish papers related to their own subjects, but as a methodology, SD are widely applied by different subjects, and most papers using SD were published in other journals rather than in SDR. This might reduce the sources of paper manuscripts for publication and paper quality.
3). I revisited to SDR online and checked the SDR historical published papers for previous years, what impressed me are:
a. Too few research papers were published in each issue, maximum 3-4 papers, some issues may only 1-2 research papers, some issue even re-published the achieved papers. Personally, I do not object to republish those good papers, but this gave me an impression that there may be not enough paper manuscripts sources for publication. also each paper is too long (20 to 40 pages per paper).
b. BIG GUYs (Famous ones) in SD might published many papers in other journals, but they did not publish enough papers in SDR for some reasons. Other researchers may also published their SD-relevant papers with good quality in other subjects' journals. those reasons may be not good for increasing the SDR quality and reputation in academics
c. SDR published some SD application paper with modelling, but some models were not quantitatively validated by historical or observed data. Most focused on qualitative patterns, which may not be good enough for real applications, or accepted by others, especially by the scientists from other subjects. Sterman stated: all models are wrong, and modelling may be used to confirm or test real world or history. So it is necessary to publish some applications of SD in different subjects with real data or quantitative validation.
4). suggestions:
a. SDR should encourage readers to submit their works and publish more papers with reduced length of each paper in each issue.
b. Each national or regional chapter of SD society should organize or collect their members' works and publish those works as supplementary issues, which may show their effort to others, or make their efforts visible in SD group, such as China chapter, so many work have been done, but few have been seen in SDR.
The above is my personal view.
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I am also considering to attend the Boston conference.
Here is some of my comments:
SDR is primarily as a methods journal.The readership is not huge because SD is not a huge methodological field.
Management Science, along with Administrative Science Quarterly, is top flight management journal. Both of these journals seem very receptive to SD approach.
I think SD practitioners should publish in other top jounrals and to be accepted by other social researchers rather than limiting themselves in the SD journals.
As Repenning (2003) said:
Developing an active community working within the mainstream of the social, managerial and policy sciences is likely to be a step towards achieving the goal.
I do not know whether my comments are OK.