Category: Articles
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A Business Is More than a Balance Sheet
Teachers sit on the bleachers at town meetings watching the townspeople resist raising their salaries. The Dartmouth faculty complains to the trustees about the governance…
Learning Organizations: From Invention to Innovation
“Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The most successful corporation of the 1990s will be something called a learning organization,” intoned a recent Fortune…
Drifting Goals: The “Boiled Frog” Syndrome
It’s becoming an old story in the systems thinking field: If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he will immediately hop…
Fixes That Fail: Oiling the Squeaky Wheel—Again and Again . . .
How many times have you heard the saying “the squeaky wheel gets the oil?” Most people agree that whoever or whatever makes the most “noise”…
Limits to Success: When the “Best of Times” Becomes the “Worst of Times”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” wrote…
ithink®: The Visual Thinking Tool
We live in an age of spreadsheets. From tracking expenses to projecting future revenue streams, spreadsheet software packages have become an invaluable tool for many…
Bringing “Background Analysis” to Foreground of Energy Policy
In this article, Donella Meadows shows how computer models — products of structural thinking — can help bring clarity to a complex issue. As she…
S-shaped Growth and the Law of Diminishing Returns
Most of us are familiar with the story of Sir Isaac Newton sitting underneath an apple tree and “discovering” the law of gravity when he…
How Do You Know If Your Organization Is Learning?
Over the past year, since the publication of The Fifth Discipline, there has been a lot of activity and inquiry around the topic of how…