System Archetypes

Sources: Jay Forrester, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Dan Kim, William Braun, and others.

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Forrester’s 1968 List

(

Urban Dynamics

, Chapter 6: Notes on Complex Systems) • • • • • • • Counterintuive behavior Insensitivity to parameter changes Resistance to policy changes Control through influence points Corrective programs counteracted by the system Long-term versus short-term response Drift to low performance Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany 2

Dana Meadows’ 1980 List

(Whole Earth Models & Systems,

Coevolution Quarterly

) • • • • • Policy resistance Drift to low performance Addiction Official addiction – shifting the burden to the intervener High leverage, wrong direction Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany 3

Dana’s Recommendations for Global Policy

• • • • • • Respectful of the system Responsible for the system’s behavior Experimental Attentive to the system as a whole Attentive to the long term Comprehensive •

No part of the human race is really separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. We all rise or fall together.

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Braun’s List

• • • • • • • • • • Limits to Growth (aka Limits to Success) Shifting the Burden Eroding Goals Escalation Success to the Successful Tragedy of the Commons Fixes that Fail Growth and Underinvestment Accidental Adversaries Attractiveness Principle Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany 5

Limits to growth [Limits to success]

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Shifting the burden

Examples?

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Eroding goals

What famous model does this come from?

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Escalation

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Success to the successful

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Tragedy of the commons

Not clear one can build a model exhibiting the phenomenon of the Tragedy of the Commons from this structure.

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Fixes that fail

What are the stocks?

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Growth and underinvestment

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Accidental adversaries

I’ve never seen this applied.

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Attractiveness principle

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How Braun puts them together

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Things to observe

• • • • • Forrester’s list comes directly from simulation-based studies Meadows’s list is similarly based on empirical experience with formal models Braun’s list (adapted from Senge and Kim) is distant from formal models.

Some archetypes are easy to model.

Some archetypes are hard to model.

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A stock-and-flow archetype

(Andersen and Richardson, various interventions) Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy University at Albany 18