Coping with complexity: System Dynamics provides tools to understand our world

As The world becomes more complex many find themselves bombarded with more problems to solve, less time to solve them, and fewer chances to learn from their mistakes. Professor John Sterman underscored this lesson in an on-campus lecture Tuesday night as he presented an overview of problem solving tools to students at WPI.

Before skipping to the next article, consider this: all people will be managers, either in their place of work or in their own lives. Each of person will need to deal with complexity, and studies have shown that we are woefully unprepared to do so.

In a study at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Professor Sterman asked MBA students to solve a simple problem. Water is flowing into a bathtub at a varying rate, and out of the bathtub at a steady rate. There are no delays before these flows take place, no dynamic interactions with other entities, no one else is able to mess things up for you, and everyone is familiar with the concept of running water. Evaluating an integral is not needed to solve this problem! Still, the majority of the students asked to solve this problem couldn't do so accurately. This isn't restricted to MBA students at MIT, either; Professor Sterman performed the same experiment at WPI on Tuesday and had the same results.

Complex systems are difficult to deal with because they are counterintuitive. It's hard to estimate the effects of a public policy after five years because no one can keep track of all the variables in their head, let alone how the variables

interact. This issue is further compounded because these "solutions" end up creating additional problems that need their own solutions, developing into a cyclical nightmare.

System Dynamics provides a tool to use that can help tackle this complexity. It's not a computer program or list of procedures that magically fixes problems, instead System Dynamics is a way of approaching the world that can reveal insights into the way things work. To date it has been credited with saving companies billions of dollars, providing key material for improving social programs and policies (like the war on drugs, taxes, and environmental concerns), and giving a few students here at WPI something to crow about.

To find out more either stopping by the SSPS office in Atwater Kent, or getting in touch with the System Dynamics Club. We'd love to help you cope with complexity. for more information email sdofficers@wpi.edu, http://www.wpi.edu/~sdclub/