When Jay Wright Forrester published his first paper in 1958 he subtitled it “a majorbreakthrough for decision‐makers”. At the time some thought this rather an exaggeration if notpompous. Now that 50 years of system dynamics (SD) has elapsed we can at least point to theachievements made and re-state continuing progress in the pages of this section. Was it a ‘majorbreakthrough’? It certainly has the potential to raise the standards in evidence‐based policy makingto warrant this description and some startlingly good examples of such work will be mentioned here.But after 50 years perhaps one might expect more than has surfaced heretofore.
The key might be connected to the skills required to formulate good SD models – those which addressa real-world problem with devastating simplicity and insight. It is deceptively easy to produce anSD model but there are subtleties involved in producing a really effective model for policypurposes. An uplift in modeling skills is something which a subset of...
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag
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Dangerfield, B. (2009). System Dynamics, Introduction to. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_538
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