By Mario deSantis, February 28, 1999

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.

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.

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)

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.

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, iterative, and participative, System Dynamics is the only answer in the search for a unifying and systemic framework to restructure our compartmentalized educational systems.

Endnotes

1. Thomas Stewart is the author of "Intellectual CAPITAL: The New Wealth of Organizations", Doubleday/Currency, 1997. http://members.aol.com/thosstew/bio.html

2. 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

3. Systems Dynamics in Education: An Introduction, by Mario deSantis, February 13, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News

4. Systems Dynamics in Education: Thinking Differently, by Mario deSantis, February 20, 1999. Published in the North Central Internet News

5. The paradox of this Linear Thinking mentality has been described by the saying that "nine women can't make a baby in one month"

6. 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