REPLY Separate Professional Conference (SD6299)

[System Dynamics Mailing List]

Posted by  "Kim Warren" <Kim at strategydynamics.com>

Richard is puzzled why a separate business conference or day is needed. 
< Why should academics feel they are immune from practitioners, or vice
versa? > .. the fact is that relatively few practice-based presentations
are *offered* to the conference. There is certainly no prejudice against
such presentations in the submission and review process - indeed rather
the reverse .. my impression is that reviewers pounce on anything that
looks like a good example of good application of SD. Can Richard or
anyone else point to good practice-based papers or presentations that
have not been accepted for the SD conference?

Two reasons why business people might not be interested in the current
SD conference. First is that business applications are [rightly] only a
small fraction of the topics the annual International SD conference
covers.

Secondly, the needs of academics from academic conferences can be quite
different from the needs of practitioners, as the history of the
Strategic Management Society [SMS] annual conference shows. Originally
positioned as the 'A-B-C' strategy conference, it attracted for many
years all the big names in the field from business schools and
consulting firms, plus plenty of top managers. It was promoted by key
academics on the [tongue-in-cheek] basis that:

- Academics have the clever ideas
- Business people come to the conference to learn about them first
- Consultants then copy what the As and Bs do and sell it to other
companies

The reality has become that business people and consultants lost
interest in just talking about their accomplishments to competitors and
academics, so it fell to the academics to supply the content. The
remaining business people did not see much useful in what the SMS
Academics were saying [e.g. large numbers of after-the-event statistical
analysis papers] .. but lots of academics turn up to exchange what they
are investigating, because that's a first stage of how they get their
papers into academic journals. They get into top academic journals by
showing they are moving forward the science, not by demonstrating
application value in the real world.

So more and more academics turn up at SMS, fewer and fewer business
people and consultants turn up. Last one I went to in the US had ~500
delegates of which >80% were academic, >15% consultants and <5% business
people. And the consultants were only there to see if there was anything
they could take away and sell, not giving presentations about great
strategy work they had done for clients.

Nothing wrong with that kind of conference, of course, but it's not
useful to busy executives.

My impression is that the SD conference has resisted this pressure more
successfully, but it's tough. This conference must be useful to
academics, in order to bring through the bright youngsters - whether
they end up going into academia or business. This makes it real hard to
get execs away for 1 day, let alone 2 or 3, because it has to be nearly
all directly relevant.

A business-oriented day at the end just might work, but would have to
show plenty of real applications with real value, and neither business
people nor many consultants have much incentive to show up and give away
their competitive advantage. [There is one significant consulting group
in the field who keeps its cards *very* close to its chest, and never
shows up, but we can be sure they scan this discussion - you know who
you are!]. But perhaps such an event could be aimed at enlarging the
cake for all to take a bite - which suggests it would need to be
promoted jointly by the consulting firms. As a very small representative
of this group, my problems would be [a] persuading clients to be open
about what was done, and [b] persuading them it was a good use of their
time to come and talk about it. Perhaps Richard and others have got some
more amenable clients?

BTW - not sure the Pegasus conference represents this alternative
SD-for-business conference, unless it has changed a lot. It used to be
largely qualitative systems thinking and a lot of related non-system-dynamics
content. Again - nothing wrong with that, but it's not what business
people *could* obtain from a focused system dynamics event. 

Kim 
Posted by  "Kim Warren" <Kim at strategydynamics.com>
posting date  Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:40:27 -0000