DVD Review 91DVD Review

Available from the System Dynamics Society.Email: system.dynamics@albany.eduUS$120 Current Society member; US$60 Student member;US$300 non-member.

System Dynamics Review Vol. 21, No. 1, (Spring 2005): 91–94Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sdr.305Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The MIT System Dynamics Group Literature Collection

This article reviews the MIT System Dynamics Group Literature Collection offeredby the System Dynamics Society on DVD. The Collection includes D-memos(described below), MIT doctoral and master’s theses, instructional materials, andseveral papers published by members of the Group. The names of reviewers arenoted by the portion of the Collection they reviewed.

D-memos (George Richardson)

The Collection’s centerpiece is an assembly of “D-memos” or discussion memo-randa prepared by professors, researchers and students, representing nearly fiftyyears of work in system dynamics. This collection of D-memos from the SystemDynamics Group at MIT is historically fascinating to people currently in the field.It allows one to trace over time aspects in the development of the field at the placewhere it all began.

If you browse from the beginning, you will find D-0000, a note to the FacultyResearch Seminar at the Sloan School, which outlines weaknesses in previousattempts to model economic and industrial structure and behavior and pointsforward to a number of the enduring characteristics and strengths of the systemdynamics approach. This is where we come from.

You’ll also find lots of models, including this sample:

• D-0023, the Production-Distribution system that appears later in IndustrialDynamics

• D-0044, a model of Sprague Electric Company (Fey and Reis)• D-0239-1, the first (very simplified) system dynamics national model (Enos)• D-0394, the initial Minute Maid project model (Weymar)• D-0429, Growth of a new product (Nord and Swanson)• D-2395, A systems view of Mount Monadnock (Richardson)• D-2508-2, Modeling the Milgram Experiments (Richmond)• D-2718, Toward a structural theory of cancer (Richmond)• D-2918, the Cummins Planning and Policy model (Lyneis)

That’s not even reaching into the 1980s. Along the way you will find teachingnotes, technical tools, thesis plans, entire theses, segments and complete modelformulations, and so on. This is endlessly fascinating and instructive stuff.

By the numbers, you will find 3,666 individual D-memos with 52,862 pagesauthored by over 290 unique contributors. The D-memo entries span from 1956through 2003.

As I browsed, I was struck by memories of people no longer with us, somehappily onto other things and others sadly passed away. I remember with great

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fondness Bill Shaffer and Michael Garet in the former category, and with greatsadness Gil Low and Dale Runge in the latter. You’ll find their work here and yourown reasons to remember them.

Theses (Joel Rahn)

There are 209 theses in the Collection from the MIT library. Forty-one are doctoralworks; with some baccalaureate exceptions, the others are mostly master’s leveltexts.

Not all of the works are strictly system dynamics. Among the documents ofhistorical interest are Jay Forrester’s 1945 master’s thesis, “Hydraulic Servomecha-nism Developments,” Papian’s 1950 master’s thesis on “A Coincident CurrentMagnetic Memory Unit” and Christman’s “Study of Automatic Control by DigitalComputer” (master’s, 1950).

Several are remarkable for their dates of publication in view of subsequentdevelopments. For example, Blitz and Weber wrote on the use of digital computersas business simulators in 1957, Hadley proposed a dynamic model of the nationaleconomy in 1958, and Greer had a look at a gaming approach to managementeducation in 1963. The whole collection is testimony to the depth and breadth ofscholarly and practical discourse that has enriched the field since its beginningsnearly fifty years ago.

One bachelor’s thesis is especially worthy of mention, Scholl’s “Dynamics ofSystem Dynamics: Past and Future” (1990, bachelor’s, Harvard). He presents ahistory of the field from the earliest days up to 1990. Although limited by its verystrongly, but not completely, MIT-centric view of the development of the disci-pline, it casts a critical eye on the evolution of the field and could be the startingpoint for a similar exercise in preparation for the 50th anniversary of the foundingof the field in 2006.

Guided Study Program and Road Maps series (Jim Thompson)

In the 1990s, the System Dynamics Group and interested colleagues developed twolearning programs: Road Maps and the Guided Study Program. Most of the paperswere written by MIT students under the guidance of Professor Forrester. Bothaimed to proliferate knowledge and use of system dynamics.

The Guided Study Program was designed as a distance learning course deliveredover the Internet. This section includes 30 course assignments and model solu-tions that capture the history of the Program. Jay Forrester compiled the assign-ments and model solutions.

The assignments and solutions are simply numbered and searching through themcan take a while. Perhaps future releases will include a table of contents and index.

Road Maps is intended to be a self-study guide for learning system dynamics,directed to perhaps a younger audience with basic math skills. Its materials aremore thoroughly documented with titles for each chapter and a subheading thatdescribes the content.

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The cadre of over 20 contributors demonstrates the joy of writing to teach.The value of their efforts is caught in Frank Draper and Mark Swanson’s articlein System Dynamics Review, Learner-Directed Systems Education: A SuccessfulExample (6(2); 209–213 (1990)).

Inevitably, the look of Guided Study and Road Maps will become dated by thesoftware used to create the models illustrated in the text. That said, the wonderfulplethora of thinking and writing should remain fresh for a long time.

For a classroom instructor, the Guided Study and Road Maps materials offertested contributions to a curriculum. Both are written in a conversational style thatmake them accessible to the intended audiences. For a consultant-practitioner, thematerials can offer a quick remedy for difficult questions posed by clients incatalytic model-building engagements.

Publications (Joel Rahn)

Limited by design to the D-memo series of peer-reviewed publications, this sectionof the DVD is the least complete in its coverage of contributions to system dynamics.

There are only 44 publications on the disk, covering the period 1985 to 1999, ofwhich 19 are reprints from journals, all but one of which have been publishedpreviously in System Dynamics Review. The other 25 are abstracts from paperspublished in other journals.

The titles in the Publication section show the ebb and flow of areas of interest insystem dynamics at MIT: from chaos theory and applications in the 1980s, througheducation issues in the early 1990s, to a more eclectic mix in the late 1990s withsustained streams of work on fundamentals, applications and system thinkingthroughout the period.

Most noteworthy and perhaps most valuable of the publications, there are:succinct presentations of fundamental issues by Richardson (“Problems with causalloop diagrams,” 1986), Peterson and Eberlein (“Reality Check®: a bridge betweensystems thinking and system dynamics,” 1994) and Ford and Sterman (“Expertknowledge elicitation to improve formal and mental models,” 1998); papers featur-ing applications by Morecroft (“The dynamics of a fledgling high-technology growthmarket,” 1986), Alfeld (“Urban dynamics—the first fifty years,” 1995), Risch et al.(“Designing corporate strategy with system dynamics,” 1995); and papers on sys-tem thinking by Dana Meadows (“System dynamics meets the press,” 1989) andBarry Richmond (“Systems thinking: critical thinking skills for the 1990s andbeyond,” 1993). While no substitute for the wider overview of system dynamicswork referenced in the System Dynamics Bibliography (available from the SystemDynamics Society), many excellent papers included are valuable for the clarity ofexposition as well as the content.

Using the Collection (Jim Thompson)

The Collection comes in DVD format only. The DVD captures all the material onone disc and can be run without putting any files on a hard drive.

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The Collection Index is done in HTML and can be run with your Web browser.Current versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape and Firefox handled the indexwithout difficulty. Search for authors, dates, D-memo numbers, or keywords can becarried out with the browser’s Find function.

Almost all scanned files, including the D-memos and theses, are Portable Docu-ment Format image files. Text searches cannot be done in PDF Image documents.This reviewer did convert an image file to rich text format with Readiris® Pro 8; theresults were mixed at best. Nonetheless, the image limitation is equivalent toreading a paper document and does not detract from the content.

In beta releases, a very few index references were incorrectly mated to docu-ments, and these errors are corrected with subsequent releases. In a few PDF files,an image or two were rotated but could be righted with software or printed prop-erly. Given the volume of data, there appear to be remarkably few of these glitches.

The papers were selected by Jay Forrester and prepared by Nan Lux with supportfrom the staff at the Society office, notably Robin Langer. The System DynamicsSociety can be contacted with error notices, and they will correct errata in a futurerelease (email: system.dynamics@albany.edu).

Summary

The Collection makes clear that it is a compendium of effort made at MIT. That iswhere Jay Forrester worked; that is where he hatched the discipline of systemdynamics, and that is where he attracted the authors of most of these works.

At one level, the Collection is a wonderfully designed and produced knowledgemanagement tool. Its use likely will save instructors and practitioners a lot of time.It is a thrifty investment, too. Just one paper copy of a thesis from the MIT library ismore than twice the price of the entire Collection.

At another level, the Collection is a potential source of inspiration—whether fora useful explanation, a robust formulation, or the next big thing. Take ThomasJackson Christman’s 1950 paper; he envisioned what it would take to install acomputer on a navy ship when the computer had barely been invented. Have alook at Malcolm Jones’s 1957 paper on inventory oscillation in a production-distribution system and Packer’s 1963 paper on corporate growth. Nat Mass’s 1974study of economic cycles, Nathan Forrester’s 1982 synthesis of macroeconomictheory, and Jim Hines’s 1987 essays on economic behaviors modeling extendelegant bridges to institutional economics. These are at the very root of it all, and itis difficult not to be just a little awed.

In a nutshell, the Collection is as much about people making knowledge as it isabout what they learned.

Jim ThompsonJoel Rahn

George Richardson