Systems Thinking

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Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: The Failure of the Reform Regime…. and a Manifesto for a Better Way

With the UK’s public sector in crisis, John Seddon’s fiercely outspoken new book is already causing a stir. Wrong-headed, ill thought-out reform from a succession of monetarist governments has led to unwieldy systems of mass production that do little for the people they are supposed to serve. Hospitals, local authorities, schools, housing associations, taxation and benefits offices: all are victims of a dysfunctional regime created by a government-enforced culture of deliverology that puts targets and red tape before people. In Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, John Seddon argues powerfully for the government to forget sticking plasters like CRM and citizen empowerment and says don’t tweak the system. Ditch it. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector gives example after example of exactly how the system fails from housing benefits and care for the elderly to call centres like Consumer Direct. Drawing on Seddon’s extensive experience working as a consultant with UK public sector managers, this is a fiercely uncompromising, yet rigorous manifesto for change.

Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics: A Feedback Systems Approach

Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics introduces the system dynamics approach to modelling strategic problems in business and society, based on the author’s successful MBA course at London Business School. The book covers all stages of model building (from conceptual to technical) including problem articulation, mapping, equation formulation and simulation. It includes a range of in-depth practical examples that vividly illustrate important or puzzling dynamics in business, society and everyday life (e. g. drug-related crime, perverse hotel showers, intended supply chain cyclicality, spontaneous product growth from word of mouth, managed market growth leading to premature decline, boom and bust in oil and housing, the collapse of fisheries etc). In order to bridge the experience gap for the undergraduate students the book includes gaming simulations and microworlds. The easy to use simulators expose students to the vagaries of communication and cross functional co-ordination in organizations, highlighting blindspots that unintentionally undermine strategy. These tools allow readers to roleplay in dynamically complex and loosely coordinated systems. The simulations include a baffling hotel shower, a start-up low-cost airline, an international radio broadcaster, a commercial oil producer and a fishing firm.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth, Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Meadows’ newly released manuscript, edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world – war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation – are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. Although both tools and methods are included, the heart of the book reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble and to continue to learn. Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World

Today’s leading authority on the subject of this text is the author, MIT Standish Professor of Management and Director of the System Dynamics Group, John D. Sterman. Sterman’s objective is to explain, in a true textbook format, what system dynamics is, and how it can be successfully applied to solve business and organizational problems. System dynamics is both a currently utilized approach to organizational problem solving at the professional level, and a field of study in business, engineering, and social and physical sciences.

Learning for Action: A Short Definitive Account of Soft Systems Methodology, and Its Use Practitioners, Teachers and Students

From the father of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), Peter Checkland, comes a new, accessible text which clearly and concisely looks at SSM. The book leaves out all of the development detail and historical/intellectual material which can be found in Checkland’s other classic works, but contains the practical essentials that will allow teachers to teach SSM accurately and students to learn it with real understanding.