What is progress?

It's easy to think progress is measured by GDP, trade balances, or the number of things we have; that's what we read and hear about in the news. Yet there's an undercurrent that suggests such views have it all backwards.

The Glaser Progress Foundation has a program area devoted to measuring progress. Go there to see a video or hear an audio of a 1968 speech by Robert Kennedy suggesting that GDP measures all the unimportant things or to research articles they've assembled.

Thanks to Joost Bonsen's Maximizing Progress for the link. Thanks, too, to Cliff Havener and his Meaning : The Secret of Being Alive. I read that years ago, and I'm pretty certain he makes the point that Lord Kelvin was wrong: all the important things—love, peace, faith, art, ...—share the attribute that they can't be measured by numbers. I've looked, though, and can't find the reference; if anyone can provide me the page number, I'd appreciate it.

Food and fuel in the news

DrumBeat: April 25, 2008 offered two particularly interesting links.

First, Time offered How to End the Global Food Shortage, their suggestion on three actions we can take in the short term. I'm not sure I see a long-term solution there, for I sense that global population is still growing exponentially, while their solutions seem focused on taking current food production to a new level, not creating matching exponential growth in the production and distribution of food. Put in systems terms, I sense population is still driven by a reinforcing loop, while the three Time proposals seem driven by goal-seeking loops. The short-term effects do seem beneficial, as long as we don't forget the longer term.

Second, oil financier Matt Simmons has published more presentations. Check out The 21st Century Energy Crisis Has Arrived. Slides 9-10 should not be a surprise to any who took IMT 586 at the University of Washington last winter or who have worked the challenge on pages 212-213 in John Sterman's Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World with CD-ROM.

While you're there, also see his Are We Nearing The Peak Of Fossil Fuel Energy? Has Twilight In The Desert Begun? He does offer optimism, but only if we act well and only after some, um, "transitional" times. If anything, I wonder if his estimate of the rate of decline of production is optimistic, for, with the high raw demand for petroleum these days, I suspect we will deplete available reserves at a rather rapid rate.

Followup to Bush and greenhouse gases

One of the claims about working on greenhouse gas emissions is that it costs too much. Business Week tries to put that in perspective.

Fooled by Randomness: some thoughts

I read and wrote about Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan some time ago; now I'm reading his Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

I'm struck by the application of his ideas to environmental and ecological issues. It seems as if we're placing most of our societal bets on growth, a bet that has played well for centuries. Given the current news, though, those seem like some of the investment bets Taleb describes as foolhardy. A prudent "investor" (citizen or business person) at this stage in the Earth's development might place most or all money on bets that can't lose much. Betting on the ability of the planet to absorb more growth, on nonrenewable energy sources to remain plentiful, or on technology to increase efficiencies sufficiently yet again seems like a risky bet, given the news of the day (and year and decade).

That's consistent with the precautionary principle; do check out THE YEAR IN IDEAS: A TO Z.; Precautionary Principle from The New York Times.

What do you think?

For more on Taleb's book, see words by Andrew Gelman, Wikipedia, and James Glassman.

Business, Earth Day, and other thoughts

After teaching at my first Bainbridge Graduate Institute Intensive, I am very impressed. The administration, faculty, and student body seem, in person, even more focused on and effective with both words in "sustainable business" than they say they are. I confess that this MBA program truly excites me, and I am glad to play a small part in its work.

That led me to think about business, business practices, and Earth Day tomorrow (there is another Earth Day that passed last month). A bit of looking turned up Nice Guys Don't Finish Last, a Business Week article that indicates that international executives seem to think being green helps them. You can see more in The Economist's report.

A bit more looking turned up Climate Counts, which promises to help us as consumers and as investors, think about which companies have made more strides than others. If you're in business, see their scorecard to think about various dimensions to climate impact. While we might quibble about the weighting of the various dimensions and the focus on climate alone instead of also including usage of nonrenewable resources, social justice, and other issues of corporate social responsibility, we can probably learn from reviewing their measures. Even though I think my overall footprint as a company is quite small, it's prompting me to make an assessment and to think about additional factors that I think might be important.

If you're looking for other thoughts for Earth Day, check out the Donella Meadows Archive at the Sustainability Institute. After being part of the team that did the research and produced the original Club of Rome report, she wrote the weekly Global Citizen, which you can peruse in that archive. There's plenty of food for thought there.

What suggestions and thoughts do you have?

President Bush and greenhouse gases

I haven't been a political blogger, and I'm not about to start now. Yet the news of the past few days does offer ways to illustrate systems concepts I've mentioned before, and so I thought I'd point out what I hope is obvious to all here.

For but one example, take US President Bush's goal of having greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stop growing by 2025, which is stirring up comment world-wide.

In system dynamics terms, GHG emissions (largely CO₂) are a flow, and the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere is a stock. If you recall what I've written before on stocks and flows, you'll see that stopping the increase of a flow does not mean that the stock will decrease; it simply means that it will increase less rapidly.

In other words, even if we do meet this goal, things may well continue to get worse well after 2025, but they will at least get worse less rapidly after then.

I want to show you a little model that demonstrates that behavior, but, to publish it here, I'd like to get the numbers at least close to right, and that would take a bit of research time I don't have tonight. Let me try an analogy, instead; those of you who studied and remember the calculus can probably make a more elegant argument, and those who do system dynamics models can create one on your own in a few minutes (if you have the needed parameters, let me know, or post a pointer to your model).

In the real world, we are emitting CO₂ into the atmosphere by breathing, burning fossil fuels, and the like. That stock of CO₂ in the atmosphere is growing and threatening climate havoc.

Some of that CO₂ is taken out of the atmosphere each year through the action of photosynthesis and perhaps other mechanisms.

According to the science I read, we have too much CO₂ in the atmosphere at present, and our global CO₂ emissions per year, already above what the environment can naturally purge, are increasing. If that weren't the case, there would be little reason for President Bush's call to action.

Let's look at an analogous situation. For example, let's say you have a bathtub that's three-fourths full of water. The drain is open, but it's partially clogged, and so it's draining slowly.

In addition, the faucet is turned on, putting more water in the tub. It so happens that the water is currently coming into the tub faster than the partially-stopped drain can take it out, so the water level is rising, causing fears for the well-being of the bathroom floor.

The person controlling the faucet is opening the faucet as we speak, letting water come into the tub at an ever faster rate. That person, realizing the risk to the floor, promises to stop opening the faucet anymore in about 15 minutes.

What do you think will happen to the floor?

Even with the rough data I supplied, I hope you can see that the water will rise increasingly rapidly for the next 15 minutes. If the person takes their hand off the faucet in 15 minutes, the water will continue to rise until it overflows the tub (assuming it doesn't overflow sooner). The only way to save the floor is to reduce the flow of water from the faucet to below the flow of water out of the drain before the tub overflows. Even if they started reducing the flow of water out of the faucet now, the water in the tub would still rise until the inflow was less than the outflow.

Of course, this is a silly little example; the real world of GHG emissions is much more complex. Yet the general principle of stocks and flows holds: as long as the inflow exceeds the outflow, the stock will rise.

I'm not about to use this short, informal essay to argue for or against specific GHG or climate proposals or to try to balance climate stability against economic stability. I am suggesting that we all remember the lesson of stocks and flows when we are thinking about or evaluating policies such as these.

PS: Thanks to colleague Wayne Wakeland for, in a totally different situation, reminding me of the effectiveness of simple bathtub models (and I hope it worked here!).

Grow or die

The title is a rough quotation from an interview I read by a CEO recently. It doesn't matter who it was; it's a common business notion, I sense.

I understand the sentiment, really I do. There is a real fear that, if we don't grow, we'll be overtaken by those who do grow. Or that we'll become stagnant and stale.

Yet I'm mindful that, if we all grow, we'll surely die (or at least suffer), too. Read Limits to Growth, if you're uncertain about my statement. Note that "limits to growth" in that book is not a statement of an environmentalist's hope; it's a statement of fact. We will face limits to growth. We can choose the nature of those limits (or at least we have had the chance), but stop growing we will. You can't exceed the carrying capacity of an environment forever.

So, if it's true that we all (or most all) want to grow (our companies, our houses, ...), and if it's true that we will face (and are already facing) real limits to that growth, what do we do?

I've written about growth a number of times, but I admit that I don't have all or even many of the answers yet. Perhaps I'll find out more in the next few months, for I'm co-teaching a systems thinking course at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

If you're not familiar with BGI yet, their vision is "To infuse environmentally and socially responsible business innovation into general business practice by transforming business education," and they've got a good reputation in this area.

As I did when I taught system dynamics at the University of Washington, I suspect I'll learn a lot here, this time with a distinct focus on sustainability and business. I'm really looking forward to this experience. (And, as I did last time, I will refrain from telling you anything that goes on in class unless I have explicit permission, but I may tell you a bit about how I grew.)

System dynamics in practice: lessons learned

Drew Jones, Don Seville, and Dana Meadows of the Sustainability Institute wrote Resource Sustainability In Commodity Systems: The Sawmill Industry In The Northern Forest. That provides a good example of a way to use system dynamics models (it's of course not the only way).

I like that paper for several reasons. The model seemed good (at least from the explanation; I haven't explored the model yet), and the explanation of the model and its implications seemed good. What may be especially interesting to some is that they spent the last third of the paper talking about what they learned about the human side of the equation: how people responded to their work, and what they learned from that. The top of page 26 seems noteworthy, although you'll probably have to read the preceding 25 pages to make good sense of it.

Focusing on the symptom or the cure?

I recently read Jay Forrester's "Churches at the Transition Between Growth and World Equilibrium," a paper prepared for the National Council of Churches and published as part of Toward Global Equilibrium: Collected Papers, ed. Meadows and Meadows and published in 1973 (also available from Pegasus Communications).

Forrester emphasized two points that may be worthwhile today to some of you reading this:

• When fundamental changes happen in the environment in which we operate, old rules of thumb likely no longer appply.
  
• Trying to fix problems by focusing on symptoms is highly risky, for, even in static times, our intuitions don't always work as well as we need. In times of transition and turbulence, it's especially important to ensure one understands the dynamic causes of the problem being faced before engaging in actions that could be counterproductive.
  

Forrester was a bit more direct than I was in my paraphrase. "One should never attempt to find a solution without first establishing the dynamic causes," he wrote, and system dynamics was his tool of choice for testing whether one had found the underlying causes or not.

Today we face increasing energy costs, increasing population density, increasing effects on climate and on the inhabitants of the Earth from the by-products of our industrial and private activity, fundamental shifts in the distribution of production and wealth, a scarcity of resources that were abundant in the past, and the fall-out from overextended financial markets. No matter your type of organization, the complexity of these changes taxes our understanding.

In a time of such changes, how do you make sense of the challenges your organization faces? How do you determine which actions to take to achieve the sustainable successes you want?

If you'd like to discuss ways in which you might make more sense of those issues, ways you might understand the likely causes of the dynamics you face, and ways you might test your proposed actions faster and at less risk than by just trying them, get in touch. Perhaps I can be of help as you seek to fix problems and not just reduce symptoms. Of course, there's no charge or obligation from such an initial discussion.

How It All Ends and John Sterman

Some time ago, I posted a note linking to a John Sterman comment about global climate change. This morning, thanks to a randomly found posting, I discovered How It All Ends, a video that says something quite similar.

Greg Craven, the creator of the video, has put together a monster series on risk management, our role in the world, and global climate change. The first video is not quite 10 minutes long, and it presents the basic idea. It leads to an index video, which presents a few more ideas and leads to the menu video. While those last two seem like they might be boring and useless, you might find they add more value and are thus worth watching (perhaps the index more than the menu), even if you eventually find Wondering Mind 42, his Web site that has the list with links to each of the videos.

So at least go watch the first and perhaps the second video now, and see what you think. You might discover it's worth watching more. You might learn new ways of thinking ... and acting. Learning new things is almost always good, right?

And don't forget to read John Sterman's comment, if you haven't already.

More on LTG

I'll try to stop writing about LTG for a bit, but, before I do, I did find one other interesting paper that some of you might want to read. Matthew Simmons of Simmons & Company International wrote Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?" back in October 2000. It appears to be a very readable, data-rich analysis of the changes in key parts of the world by someone who has been active in the energy business for decades. Check it out.

Simmons is a prolific writer; he has published a series of speeches and papers online (check the archives and the Oldies but Goodies, too). I'll have to come back and read more later.

Postscript: While I should be doing other things, I'm reading more of his articles. I encourage you to read his PEAK OIL: Is It Real? When Might It Occur? from February 25, 2008. While you need to start at the beginning to get context, check out his recommendations starting on slide 48:

Only viable solution that can work now:

• The solution: TRAVEL LESS
  
  
  
  • Less long distance commuting
    
  • Grow foods at home
    
  • Make goods locally
    
  
  

What do you think?

Cassandra's curse and LTG

Almost two years ago, I posted about Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Whether you saw that posting or not, I suspect you know Limits to Growth, often referred to by its initials as LTG.

Now Ugo Bardi has written Cassandra's curse: how "The Limits to Growth" was demonized in The Oil Drum: Europe. It's his view how LTG started to stimulate true dialog about a major challenge for the planet and how it then became "everyone's laughing stock" (well, perhaps not everyone's).

That's changing. As Bargi notes,

Climate studies have also brought back the limits of resources to attention; in this case intended as the limited capability of the atmosphere to absorb the products of human activities. In this field, the LTG study can be seen as having taken the right approach from the beginning; modeling for the first time the interaction of the environment with the human industrial and agricultural system.

If you've not read LTG, I encourage you to read it now. If you'd like, you can buy Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update online, or you can find it in your favorite library (you can change the country or specify the location more precisely).

System dynamics, black swans, and the management of business

I'm currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. While I intend to tell you more of what I think when I'm finished, I have an early impression, based on stories such as what he calls "Hume's problem" (or the turkey problem). That's a problem in which everything seems to be getting better and better, only to change direction suddenly and drastically for the worse. In his example, the turkey sees life as a daily succession of friendly humans offering food, only to have it cut short in a manner seemingly quite out of character for life as the turkey has perceived it. (As Taleb points out, it all makes eminent sense to the butcher.)

I think that's part of the reason for system dynamics as yet another tool for thinking and working. As Geoff Coyle points out in his System Dynamics Modelling: A Practical Approach, top management is concerned about things such as the consequences of actions, the likely future, and robustness against uncertainty (p. 15). One of the basic parts of the system dynamics approach is to challenge preconceived notions of the extent of the system causing the current situation: are we looking over a broad enough time span, are we including enough of the actors and actions, and are we paying attention to feedback effects (what Taleb calls recursive effects on p. xxii), where something we do today might come back and affect the situation we face tomorrow?

While there are no guarantees, that unfortunate turkey, had she had good training in system dynamics (or a competent system dynamicist at her side), might have been inspired to look at life over a 5-10 year time span, not just the few months she had experienced. That might have surfaced the fate that led to her demise as part of a regular pattern (albeit one that occurred rarely compared to her lifespan). Had she looked not only at the friendly human feeding her and the other turkeys eating with her, she might have noticed the butcher looking eagerly over the fence from time to time and asked about his role in her life. Had she realized the implications of those observations, she might have decided not to become quite so friendly with her "caretaker," she might have decided not to eat nearly as much (if she were scrawny, might her fate have been different?), and she might even have encouraged the other turkeys to join her in an escape attempt.

Now I don't think that the use of system dynamics conveys infallibility; in fact, that's why I'm reading Taleb's work, to figure out more places my insights may be fallible so that I can make them more robust.

Taleb advocates tinkering as a way to make progress; I see system dynamics as a way to tinker faster and think more effectively in support of your (and my) goal of more effective action.

While my comments may be out of the main focus of Taleb's thesis (system dynamicists tend to focus on the deterministic, not the random, even as they seek to help you be able to respond better in the presence of the random), I don't yet see them in contradiction. I offer them to you in the hopes they are of use to you. Now it's my (and your) task to try to disconfirm them; the longer we can't, the greater the likelihood there's something worth attending to!

If you want to tinker faster with the situation you find yourself in but don't want to risk your business each time you tinker, let's talk.

Thanks to Andrew Gelman for his posts that led me to Taleb's work.

Looking from the outside in...in English

Realizing that the majority of those reading this blog may not read German, I put together a quick summary of Henrik Müller's arguments to which I pointed last Friday.

In his most recent article, he claims that, in a somewhat healthy economy, we have three feedback loops that would stabilize our economy and dampen out our current problems:

• People and the government would spend more to stabilize consumption.
  
  
• Government would borrow more in order to support its temporarily increased spending.
  
  
• The Fed would lower rates to encourage consumption (and, presumably, investment).

He claims all three are at their limits here. He quotes an OECD number that says our savings rate is -1.0%, and housing values are dropping, so we have nothing left to spend.

He says our Federal budget deficit is only 3% of the GDP, and our debt, at 60% of the GDP, is 60% beneath the norm in Europe, so we could increase the debt to try to pull us out. Unfortunately, because we save so little, the only people who can buy that debt are foreigners.

Finally, while the Fed has room to lower the rate, he sees banks as ready to absorb any excess cash rather than loan it out, and he worries about inflationary pressures that may present, thanks in part to an ever-weakening dollar.

In the current political scene, he sees candidates pushing protectionist agendas and hope, while he sees our real hope as lying in global product and capital markets. In fact, the only good news he sees is that the devalued dollar has increased exports and that foreign governments seem ready to invest huge sums in US banks, and he's worried that we don't see that for the good news it is.

What do you think? If you read German (especially if you read it natively), what important points do you think I missed from the two articles?

Looking from the outside in...

One of the things that doing enough system dynamics work teaches one is the benefit of perspective. Sometimes when you're in the middle of something, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Standing back a ways and, just for a moment, trying to drop any emotions that are tied up in one's current situation can give one better insights.

That's what system dynamics modeling can often do: change a situation in which you're an intimate part to a situation you and your colleagues can look at with a bit of perspective. It also gives you the ability to test ideas on the model before you test them on the real situation.

When we can't get that perspective ourselves, either because of time limitations or because we can't figure out how to do it successfully, reading or hearing what others say about us can sometimes provide us similar perspective. Sure, those outsiders may not understand our situation as well as we do, at least in the details, but they may help us find a better perspective into which to place our more detailed understanding.

If you live and work in the USA, you've no doubt read much about our economic situation recently. I've suggested before that it's healthy to see how others see us. Recently Henrik Müller of the German business magazine manager magazin posted an article entitled Amerika steht mit dem Rücken zur Wand ("America stands with its back to the wall"), a follow-up to an earlier and more data-filled Nach der Orgie ("After the Orgy"). If you read German, or if Google Language Tools suffices, I encourage you to read these articles. He may not be correct in all his assessments, but he may give a better perspective than the headlines in the nightly news about sub-prime mortgages, foreclosures, and other problems. Certainly his earlier article does something I like to see: he gives graphs of at least some key data over a five-decade span, which is more useful for seeing patterns and gaining perspective than merely seeing what has happened this century.

How do your mental models compare with his? What are you doing in your company to adapt? What should you be doing?

A problem in policy or implementation?

There's a discussion about different approaches to solving organizational problems on a mailing list to which I belong. I posted the following follow-up:

Problems in policy implementation may be due to problems in policy design.

(In this context, a policy is a set of rules or guidelines by which we make decisions. )

While it's taken totally out of context here, I think it's very consistent with Deming's ideas, with the lesson that problems in the user manual for a product may really be a problem with the design of a product, with what I've learned as a manager leading change, and with what I've observed as a consultant: if you get the "system" designed well, the implementation may well become significantly more straightforward.

So if you're not getting the results you want out of your organization and if you're tempted to think the problem lies in the people implementing your policies, think again, just to be sure. It's possible that the problem lies in your policies.

That's actually good news, for it means the problem lies in an area you really do control, one where you really can make meaningful, effective changes.

What do you think?

IMT 586: Information Dynamics I

If you're in the Puget Sound area and have been thinking about enrolling in IMT 586 (Information Dynamics I, called system dynamics by most of the rest of the world) at the University of Washington, now's the time; the quarter starts next week.

For more on the course, see my two prior announcements.

Top postings of 2007

In the last 12 months (to be precise, from last December 28, the day after the Top postings of 2006 entry through December 26, 2007), you have chosen ten top postings on Making Sense With Facilitated Systems as ranked by unique pageviews in Google Analytics.

As I noted last year, there are potential statistical problems with this list. Those who read my blog every day using the main URL don't get counted; both last year's and this year's tallies were made from those who landed on specific URLs as reported by Google Analytics (but excluding visits I may have made). That may be okay; those who linked to specific pages may have cared more about them. Recent entries have a more difficult hurdle, as they haven't been around as long to be viewed. The dates don't quite line up with the calendar year, although I suspect that makes little difference in the results. If you know of a better way, let me know.

10. For some time now, I've been using an open source simulator for my system dynamics work because it seems to help me think more effectively. That doesn't mean I've given up on commercial tools; I still use iThink for creating interactive environments, and I will be teaching IMT 586 at the University of Washington using Vensim PLE (and I may be using it in professional applications, as well). Last April, I combined my interest in the arts with my interest in this new approach to system dynamics in a public article about marketing program for symphony orchestras. You selected TAFTO 2007, the pointer to that article, as number ten on the list.
    



9. I've written several articles about data and numbers. Making more sense with numbers part 3 offered an easy process to plot data you receive in email or reports.
   



8. The words we use can be vitally important in helping us think productively about key business, organizational, and social challenges. In A systems language for business, number eight on the list, I described one team's evolution towards a better language for discussing business issues, thanks to a course they took from me in system dynamics modeling and simulation.
   



7. Good data helps us ground our thinking in reality. Still more on data, a pointer to several online sources of data, captured the number seven spot.
   



6. Growth can create problems (witness any of the bubbles that have occurred over history), but where are good examples of successful companies that intentionally don't grow? Number four on the list is Small Giants: the American Mittelstand?, pointing to a book that answers that question.
   



5. Sometimes old technology still has utility; sometimes it still attracts interest. At number five, Technology comes full circle, a description of my continuing use of a slide rule in my work, certainly fits that description. For those who are interested, it points to a source for new slide rules.
   



4. When I first started work as an engineer, PERT charts were done using mainframe computers or hand-drawn charts. Today, project management has become a profession with a certification process, and automated tools with graphical user interfaces have long since replaced tables of numbers and dates. Your sixth-most-popular entry was Critical chains: a decade later, my revisiting of Eliyahu Goldratt's critical chain theory that linked to Tom von Alten's revisiting of his views on the approach.
   



3. Productivity is obviously important to you. Your third most popular posting of the year was a surprise to me: If you can say it, it's done, an entry about the array programming language J.
   



2. Barry Richmond has a deserved place as an educator and thinker on system dynamics and systems thinking. I posted a link to an article he wrote about systems thinking and followed up with "Scientific thinking" the modern way, a differing view on the application of modern scientific thinking in system dynamics. That was your second favorite posting from 2007.
   



1. The 2007 posting you viewed the most was the series Making musical sense by email, showcasing a conversation between music critic, composer, author, professor, and consultant Greg Sandow and me that used a system dynamics model to explore the aging of audiences for symphony orchestra concerts in the USA. Now I'm curious: was its popularity because of the topic (music), the approach (a somewhat novel approach to using system dynamics), or the fact it was a real conversation between two people? Let me know.
   

All of those postings were made in 2007. It wouldn't be fair to finish this list without noting that some postings from prior years did rank higher than some of these. Here's the all-time top ten list of postings from Making Sense With Facilitated Systems as measured by your viewings in the last twelve months:

15. TAFTO 2007 (2007)



14. Making more sense with numbers part 3 (2007)
    



13. A systems language for business (2007)
    



12. Still more on data (2007)
    



11. Small Giants: the American Mittelstand? (2007)
    



10. Technology comes full circle (2007)
    



9. System Dynamics for Cheapskates (November 2006)
   



8. Critical chains: a decade later (2007)
   



7. If you can say it, it's done (2007)
   



6. "Scientific thinking" the modern way (2007)
   



5. Making musical sense by email (2007)
   



4. System dynamics with MCSim (November 2006)
   



3. In praise of the lazy employee (April 2005)
   



2. System dynamics and program evaluation (June 2005)
   



1. Making sense with numbers (November 2006)
   

That list includes the top ten postings written in 2007 plus the five entries written in prior years that were at least as popular as the top ten 2007 postings.

As 2007 draws to a close, I want to thank you who read Making Sense With Facilitated Systems and to invite you to continue with me in 2008. If you have suggestions or feedback for this blog, contact me.

I would be honored to be of service to you or your organization in 2008. If you're trying to make sense of tough business or organizational challenges, curious how I might be able to help, or just want to talk about some of the issues you face or that I write about, get in touch.

System dynamics course

Have you heard of system dynamics here or in your reading elsewhere? Would you like to learn more, including how to create computer simulation models to make sense of some of the challenges and puzzles you face, be they at work or in the news?

The University of Washington Information School is offering IMT 586, a first course in system dynamics, in the winter quarter. Yes, I'll be teaching it. You can learn more about it, including tips on how to register, in my earlier posting called Information Dynamics: IMT 586. My instructor class description lists the three goals I have for this course. For anyone concerned about the level of mathematics required in this course, that page also points to a brief description by the author of our text describing the level of mathematics needed to do this work.

I look forward to meeting some of you in that class!

The voice of a child ...

I write here about the environment from time to time, for I think there is a significant likelihood that we will face important transitions in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our offspring that will impact us in multiple ways: personally, in the way we live, and professionally, in the way we produce what we need to live and earn what we need to acquire those things we need to live. (If TIME is right, we may not have to wait that long for those transitions.)

Presentation Zen posted You can learn a lot from "a child", a speech by Severn Cullis-Suzuki at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro. It touched on the big issues I perceive we face: figuring out how to make life sustainable on this planet, and figuring out how to live together. Watch it.

I also write about presentation skills from time to time. As Presentation Zen reports, Al Gore called this "the best speech at Rio."

A rash generalization

Friend and colleague Jay Forrest and I talk about what I find to be interesting ideas from time to time. Stimulated by an idea he once told me, I've assembled this rash generalization:

• Income (living wages, one hopes) gets made off the production that's both necessary to support the status quo and possible because of the status quo.
  
• Riches can be made off the transitions from one status quo to the other.
  
• Some disasters are made off the mistaking of a transition (from point X to point Y) for a never-ending trend (from point X ever upwards at a constant CAGR) and the effort we expend to try to make it so even after we've passed that situation's limits to growth.
• Other disasters are made when we envy the growth others exhibit and try to force our steady-state situation to match their growth.
• Disasters may take time to materialize. Part of the art of business is recognizing turning points and responding appropriately.

What do you think? Where is your business?

Leadership and systems thinking

Colonel George E. Reed, director of command and leadership studies at the United States Army Way College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, has some interesting things to say about leadership and systems thinking in his article by that name.

His ideas seem related to many of my posts on systems thinking as well as my post on the lazy employee.

Thanks to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog and the Ackoff Center Weblog for the pointers.

Information Dynamics: IMT 586

Have you ever wondered ...

• what causes some ideas, products, and companies to become fads that peak and die, while others have staying power?
  
  
• why there are business cycles?
  
  
• what causes some diseases to become epidemics and others to subside with little effect?
  
  
• why real change often takes so long?
  
  
• the role information plays in the answer to each of these questions?
  

Would you like to learn to answer these and other such questions
yourself? Are you a student at the University of Washington, or do you live within commuting distance?

Then sign up for the Information School's IMT 586, Information Dynamics I, in the Winter Quarter 2008. I look forward to seeing some of you there.

Focus on the patterns, not the events

If you've ever seen the video that accompanies The Beer Game, there's something eerily familiar in the news about real estate in the USA. (Disclaimer: The video I saw was a VHS tape with a PBS segment on a previous boom and bust cycle in real estate. I can't promise the current DVD contains the same material.) Despite 50 years of knowing that the principles of feedback control theory apply to human and organizational systems, we still create systems with poor information feedback that get us into the ecstasy of boom times followed by the despair of busts.

What does this mean to us, assuming we're not directly impacted by current real estate woes? Where do you see the potential for boom and bust in your world? How do you know? How do you test your hunches?

I can't tell you when you'll experience a bust, but I can help you discover how you can design a business or organizational system that is less likely to experience such boom and bust cycles.

Incidentally, if you'd like to play The Beer Game but don't think you have an opportunity, check out the online version.

Finding a consultant - remotely

In less than a month, Facilitated Systems will have been in business for eight years. I've worked with people in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas, and yet I've rarely seen a client, for I work mostly from my office.

In today's world, that has distinct advantages. For those of you not used to working remotely with a consultant, I'll list a few:

Responsiveness

If I came to your site to work, I'd likely save up tasks until I had half a day, a full day, or perhaps several days of work at once (depending upon how far away you are), because it's more economical. That's a delay for you.

If I work remotely, you can get my attention in the size chunks you need: minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. The delay from asking a question to getting an answer drops; if I'm available when you call, you'll start getting help immediately. If you do have to wait, the wait will likely be shorter.

Speed

You can get my help now, without waiting for me to fly, drive, or take a train. If I'm working on someone else's tasks, you need to wait for me to finish those. That's where responsiveness kicks in: if it's appropriate, you may well get some of my time starting today, rather than having to wait until I have full days available.

Lean

If I'm traveling, I'm not working for you. Sure, I try to work on planes when I can, but there is much to the travel experience that represents pure muda. Moving me to you is the essence of transportation and waiting waste.

Cost

If there's no travel, you don't pay for travel. Simple.

Carbon friendly

If I'm not traveling, I'm not generating as much CO₂.

Petroleum friendly

If I'm not traveling, I'm using less petroleum.

Congestion friendly

If I'm not traveling, I don't add to traffic congestion.

Resources

If you need a team, assembling a remote, distributed team from my contacts world-wide to help you brings all these benefits in spades.

How did I discover this? You folks taught me. When I started out, I expected to spend significant time in a car or on a plane, even as I expected to do some of my work remotely using the phone, email, and other online tools. With rare exceptions, you who hired me were quite happy to have me sit here and work there. As times have changed over the last eight years, your insights seem wisely prescient.

Some tasks do require a consultant at your site. I've done that, I will do it again, and I do enjoy working together with you in person. So call if you think that's what you need.

I have also discovered that it's possible to share ideas, build trust, work on problems, and make a joint contribution without being there in person. If that's what you seek, call me, too.

Which serves you best?

A manager's job

Here's a philosophical question for you on a Friday. What is a manager's job?

Is it to lead a group? To direct people's actions? To manage and control the progress of an organization? To make decisions? To solve problems? To follow directions from above?

While all of those may fit in the typical manager's day, I think the foremost responsibility of a manager is to create and manage human and organizational systems that will get the correct things do