Organizations exist for a purpose. Most formal ones have a mission statement that describes that purpose. Over the course of time, healthy organizations that want to achieve their mission will set goals and create objectives with performance measures to do so. This goal planning process is often revisited and updated as time progresses to assess performance toward meeting the stated goals and objectives.
Despite this very purposeful activity, many organizational leaders fall short of reaching their goals due to an inability to understand where the leverage points lie within their organization’s processes. The systems in which today’s businesses and organizations exist are much more complicated than in the first half of the 20th century. Yet many leaders still rely on linear means of looking at how things get done in their transacting of business.
Singular causes leading to singular effects is not the way reality exists. This reductionist and mechanistic view point is great at isolating and helping to understand snapshot views of some simple phenomena that occurs, but it falls way short in helping to lay out a road map that can potentially address a multitude of cause and effect relationships which always include dynamic feedback on the system in which the operating reality takes place.
Fortunately, there is a solution available to help leaders find find their way to help navigate their organization down the right road to success. Systems dynamics modeling is an affordable and effective tool that can be used by leaders and decision makers to help them make better decisions that account for the elusive pitfalls that lie beyond the capability of the human mind to understand complex interconnections that exist within our systems.
Systems dynamics modeling can help in strategic planning, teaching and communication, and policy formulation. Whether it be in health care, production, finance, or social sciences – this skill set permits mental models of how reality exists to be tested for accuracy – BEFORE possible decisions are put into action. The modeling is only as good as the mental model is mapped, but when done so correctly using the proper tools, the dynamic display of the stocks and flows of the system yield tremendous value at improving understanding.
If you are interested, please take a look at some of the examples of systems dynamic models that my former professor Paul Stepanovich created. He is the person who introduced my to the benefits of Systems Thinking and Systems Dynamic modeling while taking his classes for the health care management tract of my Master’s Degree program.
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