REPLY Future Development Directions (SD6279)

[System Dynamics Mailing List]

Posted by  Richard Stevenson <rstevenson at valculus.com>

John Sterman writes  "I cannot accept the idea that modelers,  
consultants or advisors are  responsible only for helping their  
client make better decisions regardless of the morality of those  
decisions or the purpose for which their advice will be used."

Maybe I missed it - but I don't recall that anybody in this thread  
has suggested any such thing!

Paul Holmström, rather more positively, writes  "I have consulted to  
upper management for 19 years and have yet to come across anybody  
with dubious morals."

Further, Paul says "If we are not getting through we cannot blame  
them. The onus is on us to showcase breakthrough thinking and how our  
methodology cuts through "the fog of war"."

Quite.  We will not progress in the business arena by wringing hands  
about managers' morals or their personal interests.  Managers in the  
nuclear power industry are not morally inferior to managers in health  
care - although you may, of course, decline to work in nuclear (or  
indeed health) if you choose.  We must all make value judgements  
about what we want to do.

In most real business cases that any of us will ever engage in,  
managers are genuinely trying to make difficult decisions in trying  
circumstances - the fog of war.

The fact is that business regulation IS getting extremely tough and  
that managers are increasingly under scrutiny to deliver value to all  
their stakeholders.  In my country (UK) the burden of "corporate  
governance" (i.e scrutiny of directors) covers a vast range of laws -  
employment, health and safety, environment, finance - I could go on  
and on.  I don't think it's that different in the US and Europe.

The role of the modern Board is to balance the interests of their  
shareholders against all these other interests and stakeholders.    
Often, directors are very well rewarded for doing so - that doesn't  
make them immoral, nor irrational.

Against this background of ever increasing regulation, system  
dynamics is, perhaps uniquely, now well positioned to help managers  
to balance their decisions - over time.  My purpose in starting this 
thread was to make just that point.

But SD will do itself no favours whatsoever by adopting a high moral  
tone that is narrowly dismissive of business managers and management  
decision-making.  Such comments are in my opinion ill-informed and, I  
think, perhaps indicative of the cause of SD's lack of progress in  
business in fifty years.

Richard Stevenson
Valculus Ltd 
Posted by  Richard Stevenson <rstevenson at valculus.com>
posting date  Sat, 17 Feb 2007 14:16:52 +0000