REPLY Policy paradox and SD (SD6687)

[SDMAIL Ralf Lippold]

Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>

Fred,

you just have triggered one of my personal drivers why I got into SD 
last year:

personal curiousity how to solve complex problems in which I am 
sometimes a direct active part of.

Especially in large organizations, large scale projects (acted as a 
project leader during the big flooding in Germany in Dresden in 2002) 
and processes where persons are mainly envolved with their personal set 
of mental models the results of action change is difficult as the 
dynamics of actions (including the socalled unanticipated sideeffect) 
are not easily seen. Seeing and understanding the connection between the 
action today and the outcome tomorrow is a first step into systems 
thinking.

Please apologize the rather lengthy comment at this point.

Example for personal experience around the use of SD:

1. The story is build around a rather good public transport planner 
(Metro, http://nanika.net/Metro/index-en.html) for PDAs
2. I  provided data (manually by hand;-( as a text file) for several 
cities in Germany, especially Dresden (during the flooding to provide 
costless city information for helpers from outside Dresden)
3. The initial data collecting was easily done (from scratch)
4. BUT future changes and corrections of bus/tram lines is very time 
consuming and so isn't done frequently
5. This is leading to customer dissatisfaction over time (even though 
the tool is freeware, it depends on words of mouth to be spread around 
and finding new supporters)

So the question was -and still is- how can the process of updating be 
more qualitative and efficient in order to hold the program and the 
provided data up-to-date?

As I feel responsible for the Dresden -worked with the public transport 
comany for quite some time and know the city for about 14 years now- the 
idea of switching the data input procedure to a web-based one where the 
updating could be done on a standard basis by supporters around the world.

The benefits would be:

1. Less stress for supporters to provide data (short-term)
2. Leas stress importing the updated data for the persons in charge of 
the program itself (short-term)
3. Increasing quality of data and smaller time delays of updates 
compared to actual data (mid-term)
4. Word-of-Mouth (more users and supporters worldwide)
5. As the quality stabilizes over time businesses, galeries, museums 
could put there own information, adversiment in the city files

BUT as this whole process involves several stakeholders, such as 
programmers, supporters, users, museums, businesses, city councils, etc. 
and the program itself is seen as freeware there seems to be rather 
solid resistance to change the way the data is imported.

So how can one change the diffferent mental models of the people 
involved (the main actors such as programmers and supporters) in order 
to get the change take off? What mental models hinder them to change the 
system to the better? What are ways to overcome the resistance?

Similar cases occur probabyl for all of us in their daily life (either 
work, private, sports, education, etc.) and so I was quite happy to step 
into the field from the outside being a practioner seeing the whole 
picture.

As I had no knowledge of ST and SD alike I am learning on that as much 
as I can and use the new insights in direct discussion with friends, 
colleagues, students and experience SD pratictioners. It is a constant 
learning experience with ups and downs (sometimes there are really deep 
valleys and you don't see how you could get up the steep slope across 
the next visible mountain of no-knowledge).

> Just out of curiosity, where, how and when does an SD practitioner acquire
> the knowledge, skills, insight, wisdom and competencies associated with
> effective implementation or change management?  I ask because I rarely hear
> the implementation side of things discussed; instead, focus is almost always
> on models and modeling.

There probably will be no one big great "implementation shot" in SD as 
it is more a learning journey (as Jay Forrester would put it:-)) and one 
has to see the vision to constantly work on the personal knowledge 
accumulation concerning SD (and other fields alike).

Quite often for most people system dynamics is just a fancy set of tools 
to build simulations and so it is even more difficult to overcome their 
mental models or better make them think about their own mental models, 
reflect on them and change their view over time.

Set mental models -in any form- are really THE CHALLENGE in order to get 
sustainable change rolling;-)

I guess we all are still on a journey and it is a great feeling to be in 
the group.

This were my -more than 5- cents on the question raised.

All the best

Ralf
Posted by  Ralf Lippold <ralf_lippold at web.de>
posting date  Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:21:10 +0100