Systemic view of the world

Its been more than 40 years from a very dramatic scientific declaration: if the humankind continued to go about its business as it had been doing until then, using up resources and imposing a tremendous footprint onto the ecosystem, the conditions on the earth will  become unfit for human existence.

I am talking about the 70's.

Those scientists, (based at MIT System Dynamics group and led by Jay Forrester, founder of the System Dynamics Discipline by applying Control Theory principles to organizational systems), as well as those who have followed in their footsteps were, after an initial shock in the scientific and economic world, heavily criticized, notwithstanding the open and documented scientific method through which those conclusions were reached. The world was not ready for such extreme indications.

Four decades later, many of the predictions are indeed happening. The Smithsonian recently published some interesting graphs that show the trend several of the indicators have followed through the years, and which unfortunately continue to rise, already above the current environmental thresholds.

These updates have to be looked at carefully. Although critics may say these originally predicted trends do not exactly mirror the observed values,the accuracy of the order of magnitude for each of these values, as well as the trends observed, cannot but deeply impress.

Tools such as System Dynamics can give us an outlook into the broad vision of processes with multiple dimensions and crossed influences, like no other method I am aware of.

However, not everybody seems to think in this way. Politicians or economists, who influence policy directly are not being trained consistently in this domain, and the main uses for system dynamics are within Businesses and for academic enjoyment, notwithstanding several other current societal issues, such as Education, Public Health, and Strategic Industrial Development may surely benefit from this type of analysis.

A typical System Dynamics Model, has just a few crucial components (i.e. Stocks, Flows, Delays, Auxiliary Variables) which unleash a myriad of dynamic behaviors. Relatively simple diagrams can add a wealth of understanding on the different causal paths decisions take, and show explicitly all relevant feedback flows, when some decisions affect us back through their unintended chain effect  on the original policy.