Dear LO listers,
I have a question for long about the methodology of systems thinking.
Recently, I have read a book by Robert Flood, named Rethinking the Fifth
Discipline, which is a deep reflection to Senge's work, and it's mainly
talking about systems thinking. ST, as Flood noted, have various
approaches, from Beer, Checkland to Ackoff, but their works rarely
mentioned on MIT's Systems Dynamics approach.
Why is it(Senge's work) so focus on SD's approach, when we are talking ST?
I had a chance to talk with futurist Hazel Henderson, she told me that she
know Jay Forrester and Dennis Meadows for decades, since they met at Club
of Rome. And because I am so admired with Henderson's insight on our
future, I asked her the model she was using in depicting the ideas of the
book(like Building a Win-win World), she told me that she never attached
to ONE model, because it's very dangerous. And at that point, she told me
something about the argument of her with Jay. She said Jay was a strong
believer of SD, and he thinks that SD is a solution to our social
problems. But Henderson sensed that Jay was too narrow and found it
problematic in approaching real-life issue. After hearing such a
conversation, together with the question asked by Bob Flood, I want to ask
is MIT's SD approach too protective such that they rarely cite other ST's
approach? And for all the approaches on ST, I found Eli Goldratt's Theory
of Constraint the most powerful and easy to learn and teach. The approach
not emphasis on feedbacks and delays, rather it focus on bottleneck, or in
ST's terminology, the leverage.
Most of the time, I found SD's approach was mainly focus on explaining the
feedback effect and time-delay, but not very much on leverage exploring.
So, for the new comers of ST, they would fascinate with the loops and
delays, but after then, they are more worry with the leverage, but it
seems not easy to find it. But with TOC's Thinking Process, the whole
reasoning is for more explicit, clear and powerful than the SD or any
previous ST's approaches. I want to emphasis than I was benefited a lot
from Senge's work, and still is, but I want to take a broader view. Why
don't we, as a community of practice, have more discussion on TOC, or
other ST approaches? And if you are familiar with both TOC and ST, don't
you think that these two method are complementary?
Joey Chan
Joey@birdview.com.hk
--Joey Chan <joey@birdview.com.hk>
[Host's Note: In assoc with Amazon.com...
Rethinking the Fifth Discipline : Learning Within the Unknowable by Robert Louis Flood http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415185300/learningorg
..Rick]
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