Category: Articles
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Paper Fold: An Exercise in Exponential Growth
The behaviors of all ecological and human systems result from cause-and-effect links that make up reinforcing (positive) or balancing (negative) feedback loops. Generally speaking,…
Revving Up a New Model of Change Leadership
What explains a large company’s success in launching—and sustaining—profound change? Certainly luck and timing might play a part, as can dramatic, visible shifts in…
Escalation: The Underlying Structure of War
The lessons we learn by studying the “Fixes That Fail” and “Shifting the Burden” archetypes revolve around the kinds of actions that we choose…
The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Crisis: A System Primed for Disaster
As I’m sure you’re aware, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit parts of Japan on March 11 of this year. These events caused serious…
Learning Differently in the Classroom
For 10 years now, Peter Senge’s articulation of the five disciplines of organizational learning have revolutionized the business and healthcare arenas. The practice of…
The Mantra of Appreciation
Ifirst learned about Appreciative Inquiry in the late 1980s when David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney developed their model, echoing Maslow’s idea that we look…
A Tale of Two Loops: The Behavior of “Success to the Successful”
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. . . .” So begins Charles Dickens’s classic novel A Tale of…
Forging Sustainable Solutions to Complex Problems
The next time you are involved in a seemingly unbreakable impasse, think about the dilemma faced by South Africans in the early 1990s. After…
Modeling for What Purpose?
System dynamics does not impose models on people for the first time—models are already present in everything we do. One does not have a…
Identifying and Breaking Vicious Cycles
Perhaps the most prevalent and accessible form of systems thinking for people new to the concept is the vicious cycle. Examples: TEAM TIP…