REPLY Society Strategy Development (SD7192)

[SDMAIL David Corben]

Posted by  "David Corben" <david at dsc-consulting.co.uk>

David Packer wrote:

>We need many more publications like "Industrial Dynamics", "Limits to Growth",
> and "The Fifth Discipline" that capture attention and excite whole new
> constituencies.

"Industrial Dynamics" defined the field and "The Fifth Discipline" certainly
created a huge amount of interest, but has it had any lasting impact?  I am not
sure that we need another "Limits to Growth" because I do not believe that SD
can
currently handle the publication of another high profile  and inevitably
contentious study.

I do not wish to open up a debate about the merits or otherwise of the limits to
growth work. I am sure we have all made our minds up about that long ago. Rather
I want to focus on how limits to growth was perceived by people outside SD, what
we can learn from that and the issues the publication of similar work raises for
the SD community. 

Lets consider the two case, for the purpose of my argument it does not matter
which of these is true or if neither of them are true.

Case 1: LTG was a brilliant piece of work, with insights that were years ahead
of
its time, but only those already converted to this way of thinking listened.

Case 2: LTG was a poor piece of work that did the credibility SD a huge amount
of
damage at a critical time for its growth.

Case 1

LTG did not seem to be able to convince people that it was right. There seemed
to
be a communication problem, the model (despite the best intentions of the
authors) was perceived as a predictive model and moreover a predicted model that
got it wrong. Journalists and politicians either did not understand or choose to
ignore that the model was designed to explore policy options and scenarios. The
worst case scenario was the one that got the most media attention.

Challenge 1

How can we effectively present SD models to the wider world so people do listen
to what we say and do look at our models in the way we intend (as policy tools,
not predictions)?

Case 2

What if the critics were right, what if we got it wrong? Probably the most high
profile SD model ever built, it is still the one thing that many people who know
nothing about SD may have heard of; not good for SD.

Challenge 2

How can we as a profession assess the merits of high profile SD work so that we
can endorse if it is good and disown it if it bad?  How do we police SD to
maintain professional standards and stamp out bad practise and bad
practitioners?

Some Thoughts

Case 1

The public reaction to LTG is a brilliant opportunity to find out what our
potential customers think about us and our methodology. A huge amount of
material
has been published over the decades on LTG in the press, books, academic papers
and on the internet.

This material could be analysed and common criticism and misunderstanding
identified.It might be useful to focus on the criticism that are generic to SD
rather than specific to LTG. For those criticisms we feel are valid we can
change
what we do to address them,  and for those we think are unfair we can create
standard rebuttals.

Many of the comments on LTG are of course partisan (pro and anti), but some are
more thoughtful and open minded. I did a brief Google on LTG and found one
interesting idea Francois Cellier posting at
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551 simulated one of the World models
backwards through time (not as daft as it sounds) and found that population
started to grow pre 1900. This technique of simulating a model backwards beyond
its initial conditions to see if it produces sensible behaviour strikes me as a
potentially useful additional test of SD model validity. Has anyone come across
this idea before and followed it up?

Case 2

In reality this is asking the question does the SD society want to become a
professional regulatory body and do SD practitioners want to be regulated? Would
people be happy to see incompetent SD practitioners barred from practising, like
doctors and lawyers can be?

David Corben
Posted by  "David Corben" <david at dsc-consulting.co.uk>
posting date  Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:00:12 +0100