As a large part of representing and being responsible for the discipline the SDS has an important enabling role to oversee and plan for development of SD’s
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Global professional contributions to resolving practical issues and problems.
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International reputation and standing as the pre-eminent approach to provision of modern, professional, high-quality decision support for complex managed systems.
The SDS has not discharged this role in the commercial/professional sphere in the past fifty years. Moreover, it has showed that it resents, and will deflect, any serious suggestion that it should undertake this role. The SDS is in sustained denial about its responsibilities, and about the real situation for SD. Nothing, including the activities of the few firms that develop professional SD models, has replaced the resulting vacuum on the international street.
Responsibility of the SDS and its associated community for the dire present situation of SD is unambiguous and unarguable. Even one or two senior SDS members have recently been prepared to concede informally that the situation is indeed dire.
Commercial and professional capacities to undertake SD applications have been left to chance and ‘market forces’. If even a fraction of the effort lavished on academic matters over the years had been applied to opening up commercial and professional aspects and prospects, the situation now would be very different.
Many cities and towns in numerous countries establish professional capacities to develop and promote themselves commercially, industrially and professionally. The SDS should have done the same. It should also have emulated the econometricians; or at least recognised in the latter’s success the need and scope to become active itself.
Other than a few professional case studies in a text book only one major professional SD application is known to have been publicly documented in fifty years.
Significantly, that document (a journal article) never mentioned the term ‘system dynamics’. As explained below, that was due to the widespread lack of regard in which SD has long been held.
In any case most potential users of professional SD models do not consult academic journals. Nor should they need to do so. The information should be taken to them, in their environments.
The above article appeared in 1980. Although practical implications of the particular application (for major civil litigation) are actually evergreen, third-party opinion is that the case happened too long ago to be persuasive now; thirty years later. The SDS community does not respond to this type of hard ‘coalface’ reality.
In any event numerous accounts of successful professional applications should have emerged under SDS auspices in the later years for development purposes, but have not. A standalone professional practitioner is thus left with nothing to show and use from the SD era to date, for marketing purposes.
An unknown significant number of professional applications are in place. However, they are believed to be mostly corporate-confidential or national-security-classified, and thus are never talked about publicly. For instance, SD is believed to be the main technical vehicle for international business income tax avoidance and evasion, through corporate models.
SD promotion by the SDS for commercial/professional purposes should have compensated for the consequences of confidentiality, but has not.
The discipline is actually significantly regarded on the international street as tainted, and as something that is not to be mentioned or seriously considered in polite society. This tragic conclusion has been driven home during years of professional contact with players as diverse as a Nobel laureate professor of finance and professional heads of military matériel procurement agencies. Some of their views are reproduced in this site.
Responsibility for lack of regard for SD does not rest at all with the techniques. They are brilliant, with huge potential. The techniques have never been more needed than now, in the Great Recession.
I had urged the SDS to emulate the highly-successful tactics of the macroeconomic and econometrics communities in years following WW2. They seized monopoly control of the international economics industry in a quite-short period: a position they have retained to this day.
Those communities have displayed ruthless effectiveness and efficiency in all aspects that count, plus impressive and productive ongoing cohesion between their academic, government and commercal wings; both nationally and internationally.
I was sternly reminded from within the SDS that it is a largely-volunteer body. I was asked what I intended to do by way of voluntary effort. In reply I stated that my SD products and project proposals could do more than most to advance the SD cause.
The exchange is mentioned only because it illustrates how poorly the SDS mindset and determination compare to those of the econometricians.
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The latter were initially also a motley collection of individuals; presumably mainly academics. In short order, following WW2, they transformed themselves into what is now the most-influential and -powerful vested interest in any western country.
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Econometricians (with their macroeconomist cousins) never made the SDS mistake of confining themselves to the academic mindset and role.
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The ‘macro-econometric orthodoxy’ created for its individual firms and practitioners the propitious environments essential for the latter to operate successfully. The orthodoxy understood, as the SDS never has, that – absent those environments – individual players may not prosper.
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My academic critic, as a modeler, made the cardinal error of treating a variable as a constant. The SDS urgently needs to begin the process of changing away from being a volunteer, academically-oriented body.
A standalone professional SD practitioner has the greatest difficulty in compensating for the lack of previous promotional effort and cohesive support by the SDS. I have often encountered a situation in which SD is regarded by potential clients as completely untried; almost as though I had invented the techniques in the past few months.
I therefore reasoned that the appropriate course of action was for the SDS to begin to make good the above shortfall, so that people in my position could advance the ‘reach’ of the techniques with useful applications. To this end I approached the SDS in late 2007.
This topic documents the nature and outcomes of that approach, in terms of short reports submitted to the SDS and later email correspondence.
The ‘macroeconomic orthodoxy’ has ensured that the entire economic and financial debate of the past fifty years has been conducted on its terms. Even in the circumstances of the Great Recession (caused by fatal defects in its methodology and rationale), macro has completely avoided, not only accountability, but any discussion of the real causes.
The SDS, by contrast, has never even reached the starting line from the viewpoint of marking out its natural constituency and attaining its potential. It has apparently never addressed issues of its long-term exclusion from key areas of that constituency. The SDS community and management have apparently been content to conduct matters almost entirely from the viewpoint of academic activities and objectives. They remain in denial about their larger responsibilities and wish only to deflect and sidestep the latter.
Although future SD growth must come largely from the professional side, there has been, and remains (other than lip service and lofty pronouncements), no effective SDS interest in promoting such growth. Proposals for doing so were batted down into the dust. Academic SD doors in several countries were swiftly closed against a project that would result in the macroeconomic orthodoxy being replaced by a new approach using SD.
The number of potential professional SD applications is huge. Only a very few firms are now engaged in such development. These cannot conceivably meet future demands on the professional side. Nevertheless, commercial interests close to the SDS are believed to have discouraged any SDS initiative to open up commercial/professional SD activity. This belief was reinforced by unsolicited information from a knowledgeable SDS member.
Three key requirements for progress therefore involve removal and replacement of entrenched SDS approaches, attitudes and practices, by things that more reflect future development needs of the discipline, and its international reputation. The three things that must be removed are:
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Academic control of the SDS, whether volunteer-based or otherwise.
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Constraints exercised by the narrow self-interest of existing commercial sponsors.
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The prevailing volunteer-based regime.
Overall conclusions of my approach to the SDS are:
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The SDS, its academic orientation and internal mindset etc are major parts of the overall problem for SD.
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SD is technically greatly superior to econometrics. Overall, econometricians are greatly superior to their techniques. With SDers the opposite has long been, and remains, true.