Replying to LO24890 --
At 11:59 PM 6/15/00 +0800, you wrote:
>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?
Senge was a student of Forrester's. If you search the SD literature you'll
find a number of articles authored or co-authored by Senge. I suspect that
like many of us, we reflect our training.
snip
>And at that point, she [Hazel Henderson] 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.
I can't speak to Henderson's perspective. After reading and studying Urban
Dynamics, and many of the articles in Readings in Urban Dynamics (to which
Senge makes a contribution) it's hard to see SD in general or UD
specifically as not grounded in reality.
Whether Forrester's UD theory works or not is open to
dialogue/discussion/debate. It could be wrong, it could be incomplete or
it could be spot on. Notwithstanding, the insights from the SD model, to
me, are stunning, revealing deep root dynamics, insights that are hard for
me to imagine achieveable without conceiving them as rates and levels.
> 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.
Not my experience. On the contrary, SD is effective in revealing menal
models. Sterman (more MIT) speaks to this, very convincingly in my
opinion. Revealing mental models IS the leverage (the "lower" loop in
double loop learning).
>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?
My aforegoing opinions notwithstanding, I don't think of SD as a Theory of
Everything, but it may stake some claim as a Theory of Quite A Bit.
I also am very interested in exploring more dimenstions to ST. I've read
much of Ackoff, whom you mention. A lot of good stuff there. I'm reading
Bertalanffy (with some difficulty I must confess). I have not read TOC and
your message has prompted me to order the book. Thank you.
Bill Braun
--Bill Braun <medprac@hlthsys.com>
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