Birds nest diagrams as a symptom of the need for SD

[Jack Harich]

See today’s NYTimes article on We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint. Here’s the slide that leads off the article:

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

Isn’t that how many of us feel about a big quick causal loop diagram that’s the result of the first few hours of engaging with a client, where our main tool is system dynamics? The process is that after the consultant and client work together to get started, the consultant goes off, uses the CLD as a starting point for an SD model, comes back, presents that, and then works with the client to mature the simulation model until it starts to capture what matters. Then the model is able to make the original birds nest diagram understandable, and the client wins the war.

Could it be that the military is intuitively inching towards heavy use of SD, once it discovers that in many cases, that’s an appropriate tool for analysis of a problem?

Jack

[Thomas Fiddaman]

The NYT is about 4 months behind the times.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=127&p=575&hilit=pa+consulting#p536

The underlying point - that presentations are frequently awful and waste time - is well taken, but hardly new.

The Times seems unaware of the irony of its own article. Early on, they quote, “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” But isn't the spaghetti diagram an explicit attempt to get away from bullets, and present a rich, holistic picture of a complicated problem?

Evidently the Times has no prescription for improvement, but here's mine:
- If the presenters were serious about communicating with this diagram, they should have spent time introducing the CLD lingo and walking through the relationships. That could take a long time, i.e. a whole presentation could be devoted to the one slide. Also, the diagram should have been built up in digestible chunks, and key feedback loops that lead to success or disaster should be identified.
- If the audience were serious about understanding what's going on, they shouldn't shut off their brains when unconventional presentations appear. If reporters stick their fingers in their ears and mumble "not listening ... not listening ... not listening ..." at the first sign of complexity, it's no wonder DoD treats them like chickens.

I do find the last item funny:

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

[Thomas Fiddaman]

Further comment:
http://blog.metasd.com/2010/04/hypnotizing-chickens/

It's interesting that a large portion of commenters on the NYT article seem to be pining for the good old days, when visual aids were crude and people could speak coherently without them. I can practically smell the mimeo fluid of their nostalgia. Obviously there were some really great speeches over the centuries, but I seriously doubt that the average was better. More likely there were just a heckuva lotta really dull rambling talks that are mercifully forgotten.

A return to pure narrative works in some cases, and people really respond to stories. However, unless the speaker has an underlying understanding of systems, they're likely to favor linear causality and event-driven explanations. That's hardly a suitable approach for a complex world.

[Jack Harich]

Thanks, Tom. As far as I can tell, the NYTimes is reporting on the level of dependence on PowerPoint and birds nest diagrams, rather than what’s possible, as

I was watching Stephen Colbert's show this evening and was amazed to see him waving around a Vensim model with the title "Afghanistan Stability: COIN Model".

seems to show.

I like your prescription. I wonder why that’s not happening. Does PowerPoint need an SD plug in?

Or does Vensim need a PowerPoint plug in?

Putting jokes aside, the article was full of chuckles and an interesting clue. On the right of the diagram we see 5 stocks connected with flow rates. Many arrows have delay symbols. Could it be that this birds nest was actually drawn by SD modelers? Did their project have a next step?

[Richard Dudley]

Jack:

The version of the diagram that is on the web at
http://incredimazing.com/page/Afghanistan_Stability_COIN_Dynamics

has "PA Consulting Group" in the lower left hand corner.

Richard

[Stephen Wehrenberg]

Jack, thanks for weighing in on this. I was just telling Gene Bellinger that I had received the article from two friends, unknown to each other.

Of course they are referring to the A-COIN model I was inquiring about not long ago in search of the model developers. In my response to them you can see my position. The blog I refer to is

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archi ... t-last.php

As I read the comments I began to realize that the implications for those of us trying to broaden the use and understanding of systems concepts are profound. We aren't merely up against ignorance, but downright stupidity. I'm writing what will be a universally unpopular book, kind of like Charles Murray did with The Bell Curve, in which I hypothesize that a certain "g" (general intelligence ... not IQ) is necessary to having a distant enough (time and space) event horizon to even understand the fundamental premise of systems thinking. Whatever ... a topic for another day.
But I would like to put this blog in front of the community so they (we) can better grasp what we are up against.

I encourage all to go to the blog above and peruse the comments. You will find gems like these:

This doesn’t look like the product of an orderly mind.

I think we might to send our COIN planners to have a long talk with Edward Tufte… that has got to be in the running for worst/most counterproductive figure ever.

The subject may well be complex, and that may be an accurate diagram of the system, but it’s also entirely useless. The whole point of graphical displays are to reduce the complexity of data to highlight interesting or useful analyses. This does nothing, nothing of the sort.

My favorite aspect of this document (and I highly encourage everyone to download and read the PDF to appreciate the bullsh*t level therein) is the vapid circularity of the thinking.

Colleagues, I don't know about you, but it causes me to alternate between weeping and laughing maniacally with the knowledge that they will all get what they deserve.

Please don't try to calm me ... I'm enjoying my righteous indignation.

Steve

[Jack Harich]

Steve,

Thanks for the link. For me the real nugget was the further link to the actual report that built the diagram. Skimming the report, to me the diagram suddenly has high credibility. The author’s goal was not to dynamically model the problem via simulation, but to conceptually model it with a pseudo CLD/SD diagram. The report builds the model one conceptual block at a time. It was probably passed out as part of a presentation and discussion.

Reading the blog replies, it seems that most people feel instant conceptual overload when seeing the diagram or reading the report. Their reaction is to cleverly denounce the diagram, using witticisms to give their objections credibility. A few, however, see it contains some gems of wisdom. I’m in that camp.

Related to this, I was casting about this morning for material to support a dramatic (Fred Brooks style) opening to a chapter on Moving Forward with a Process that Fits the Problem. Having worked at NASA for a year at the height of the Apollo Program, I knew them to be strong on process. So what did I find?

The mother of all process flow charts: The NASA Program/Project Life Cycle Process Flow. This is huge, so enlarge it until you can read it. Then right click on the pdf, switch to the hand tool, and drag the diagram around to explore it. It’s 100% sound, understandable, and implementable. And boy does it have depth. I’m staggered by the quality of this diagram and the work behind it.

Returning to:

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

If you read the report that produced that slide, it is understandable. Thus even extremely sharp managers like McChrystal have (?) bought into the myth that all large complex diagrams are worthless.

The NASA process chart should put that popular myth to rest.

Now then, how am I going to put that chart in the book?

Puzzled Jack

[Thomas Fiddaman]

Comment 2 here http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/12/coin-and-powerpoint-together-at-last.php (beware vulgarity) has a link to a pdf that builds up the diagram incrementally, as it should be.

As at the NYT, many commenters seem to be pining for bygone days of pure verbal communication. The number of expletives per comment seems directly related to the antipathy for complexity. As one comment points out,

I don’t know, I’m not thrilled by the “ooh it’s complicated” so it’s bad. That seems like more of the anti-intellectualism Americans love too much. It’s like, wow, a health-care bill has a thousand pages!

Do over a hundred thousands peoples’ jobs all fit into a simple three-box flowchart? A box with ANSF training is related to a box with ANSF capacity… seems more obvious than head-scratching.

[Jeremy Merritt]

My friend and colleague, Chris Soderquist, has just posted a response to the NYT article on the isee blog:

http://blog.iseesystems.com/systems-thi ... rytelling/

Chris uses Storytelling within a map published online to make sense of the spaghetti diagram.

Linda Booth Sweeney also has a response posted here: http://lindaboothsweeney.net/blog/?p=172.

[Leonard Malczynski]

From a practical point of view (on a PC).

1. Open Vensim and your model/CLD
2. Select all (Ctrl-A)
3. Copy (Ctrl-C)
4. Open Powerpoint
5. Paste the Vensim diagram to the page (Ctrl-V)
6. Select the pasted picture, right click and choose edit picture, PowerPoint will ask if you want to convert the picture to a Microsoft Office drawing object (Of course Bill, we do!)
7. Select the picture, right click and un-group.

With patience, zooming and animation you too can create in PowerPoint what Vensim already does!