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    system dynamics

    Exploring the Pros and Cons of System Dynamics in Modern Systems Thinking

    Senge’s work was almost entirely based on the work of another scholar named Jay Forrester at MIT under the name of “Industrial Dynamics” or later “System Dynamics.” Senge was a student of Forrester’s and his real claim to fame is not the ideas themselves but his ability to popularize them. So, when we talk about “Senge” we are really talking about System Dynamics (SD).

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Learning

    A Systems Thinking Approach to Innovation and Digital Transformation Adoption

    Technological innovations and digital transformation initiatives are difficult to adopt. Some of the leading hurdles are culture, archaic IT systems, lack of skills, and lack of a clear leadership vision. During my last years in the Army, I had the opportunity to develop various strategic visions and organizational mission statements that were focused on delivering disruptive technologies and digitally transforming enterprises. Now that I am transitioning from the Army, I had time to reflect on the outcomes of these visions and learned some lessons along the way. The purpose of this article is to share these lessons and describe how I used systems thinking as a foundation to my leadership style, the culture I fostered, and the management of my efforts to achieve strategic outcomes. First, I will introduce systems thinking, then provide references to the various mission and vision documents I created and conclude with the lessons I learned.

    • Dr. Alex MacCalman
      Dr. Alex MacCalman
    Culture

    The Most Important System in the Modern Company: An Internal Marketing System

    Why we start organizations is intimately tied to why we choose to work together in the first place. If your goal is to create a garden in your back yard, you don't start an organization--because that's something you can do on your own. We start organizations because what we want to get done, requires others. That might seem like a simple concept, but it is where organizational effectiveness is lost or won.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    DSRP Research

    New Peer-Reviewed Publication - Distinctions Organize Information in Mind and Nature

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 23, 2022 — Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera, along with Elena Cabrera, of Cabrera Research Lab and Cornell University have published a new peer-reviewed article entitled, Distinctions Organize Information in Mind and Nature: Empirical Findings of Identity–Other Distinctions (D) in Cognitive and Material Complexity in the journal Systems.

    • Staff
      Staff
    Getting Started

    Achieving Compressibility In Your Systems Mapping Practice

    When mapping systems, achieving “compression” or “compressibility” in your maps is a best practice and a desirable skill. Compressibility is an indication of higher quality, more refined thinking. In other words, no matter how complex your map needs to be; if you can compress nodes in your map, it allows for you to see the 100,000 foot level; and then also have the ability to drill down to incredible levels of detail when needed for any node (sub-system) in the map.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Systems Leadership

    In Your Organization, Build a Flock Not a Clock.

    Thanks Mark McGrath for producing this wonderful video with your son! That's why we named our book on adaptive organizations, "Flock, Not Clock"—because contrary to hundreds of years of conventional wisdom that guides us to build a clockwork organization that works like a machine, organizations are organic, adaptive superorganisms by nature...much more like a flock than a clock.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    DSRP Research

    New Peer-Reviewed Publication - The “Fish Tank” Experiments: Metacognitive Awareness of DSRP Significantly Increases Cognitive Complexity

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 4, 2022 — Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera, along with Elena Cabrera, of Cabrera Research Lab and Cornell University have published a new peer-reviewed article entitled, The “Fish Tank” Experiments: Metacognitive Awareness of Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives (DSRP) Significantly Increases Cognitive Complexity in the journal Systems.

    • Staff
      Staff
    Distinction (D) identity-other

    Need to paint a room? You'll need systems thinking...

    Making distinctions is like painting a room. It's the boundaries that need the most attention. My parents hired a professional to paint our garage every couple years. As a curious kid, I would pepper him with questions. "How do you get it smooth? Would it be faster with a sprayer? Who picked the color?" A few years later my mom gave me the job of painting the bathrooms. I then advanced to painting houses as a summer job in college. I’ve painted more walls, doors, and window frames than I care to remember.

    • Scott Moehring
      Scott Moehring
    VMCL

    The Power of Wow

    Excerpt from the book, Flock Not Clock. The Power of Sharing Mental Models: Wow Stories "I am empowered to create unique, memorable and personal experiences for our guests." This simple employee statement (number 3 on the Ritz-Carlton’s list of 12 service values)[14] exemplifies a culture in which employees are empowered to learn. Ritz-Carlton, one of the world’s most recognized luxury hotel chains, with 90 hotels and resorts around the world, uses organizational learning to drive its award-winning customer service. They do so by building capacity through institutionalized processes they call Daily Line-Ups and Wow Stories that use the power of storytelling as a way to spread learning across the organization.

    • Derek & Laura Cabrera
      Derek & Laura Cabrera
    Bias

    What You Don't See Can Hurt You...and All of Us.

    I am fascinated by how easily humans are manipulated; which is often the result of structural blindspots (bias) that are used against one another. In many ways, the last few years have been a crash course in the ways of manipulation, dishonest debate and dialogue, rhetoric, gaslighting and the like. But we often forget that these manipulations come very slowly, much like the fable of the boiling frog.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Systems Models

    On how DSRP deepens the understanding of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge

    For decades I have built much of my understanding of reality on dialectical materialism and systems thinking learned from systems thinkers and scientists before me. Maybe the most important of them was Dr. Edwards Deming. He created the “System of Profound Knowledge” (SoPK), which contains basic lessons for people who have worked with Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, and Lean (Toyota Production Systems). SoPK consists of four ways of "seeing" and understanding the world. Dr. Deming called them "lenses".

    • Bjarne Berg Wig
      Bjarne Berg Wig
    DSRP Research

    Categorization and DSRP

    This blog has been partially adapted from A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition. The Systems pattern (5) (the interaction between the elements part and whole) exists in mind and nature. Nature (a.k.a., reality) organizes parts into wholes; so, in order for humans to adequately describe nature, we should, too. Humans naturally systematize things by breaking them down into parts and wholes automatically, which often leads to the creation of "groupings" or what we often erroneously call "categories." However, categories require something else: a Perspective.

    • Elena Cabrera
      Elena Cabrera
    Emotional Intelligence

    Know Your Feelings

    This blog was written by Austin Reid as a project for PADM 5449 at Cornell University. The following three-part poster series is designed to serve as a teaching aid in preschool settings to assist children in understanding feelings and how to process them. This poster series can also be used as a teaching aid for children between the ages of three and five in other settings including daycare, summer camp or Sunday school. The first poster provides children with an opportunity to think about how they are feeling and explain why. Children will point to the face that most accurately mirrors how they are feeling and they can also learn from others how they are feeling. This check-in can also be done as a one-on-one exercise between a guardian and a child.

    • Austin Reid
      Austin Reid
    tropes

    The 8 Sacred Cows of Systems Thinking

    This isn't a blog post, but more of a blog-collection. 8 common things that systems thinkers like to say that are bupkis. We call them sacred cows of systems thinking because it is almost blasphemous to disagree with them, even though most have a much bigger bark than bite. Click on the links below (in the right column) to red the blogs on each sacred cow. And, one thing is for sure, dare to challenge any one of these sacred cows 🐮, and you'll take a rash of shit 💩for it. People will come out of the woodwork to defend them with great fanfare and handwaving 👋. But stay steady, the logic of nature 🌱 and science 🔬 eventually win them over, but it can take time ⌛. Ug. 😛 In the list below, click on the links to go to articles on the sacred cow and its scientifically-valid replacement.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Systems Leadership

    A Systems View is Not a Mask Mandate

    When I was a child, my mother would tell me a story of her own childhood. She spoke of how the children would collect tin foil wrappers from gum and cigarette packs and make a foil ball that could be turned in to help the war effort. This was all part of a scrap drive that children and citizens participated in willingly that included gathering grease fat containing glycerine that was used for bombs and metals of all kinds used in bombers (made by an increasingly female workforce that “manned” the factories where B-52 bombers were being made). Everyone pitched in because “our boys” were “over there” fighting.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Sliders

    Millennial Mean

    Learn more about the definition of a slider, or read our other sliders... If you’ve raised children, you will inevitably be accused of being mean. You’re mean because you won’t let them have a third dessert. Because you insist that they wear a jacket when it is -5°F. Or, when you enforce a reasonable bedtime. But lately we’ve been noticing that Gen Z children—and to a large extent, the Millennial generation—think of a whole range of new things as “mean.” If I were to say for example, “hey can you brush your teeth? Your breath is terrible,” that might be considered mean. Even if, factually, you have halitosis.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Learning

    Slime Molds Are Systems Thinkers Too...

    This blog has been partially adapted from A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition. When you picture things that think, a slime mold probably wouldn't be the first organism to jump to mind. However, research has shown that you don't necessarily need a brain to think; in other words, non-neural organisms can think. Previously, we discussed how chemotaxis is an inherently DSRP-based process which allows bacteria and cells to make distinctions, build systems, recognize relationships, and take perspectives. As research has shown, slime molds can do DSRP too.

    • Elena Cabrera
      Elena Cabrera
    DSRP

    DSRP in Non-Neural Life Forms and Nonliving Compounds

    This blog has been partially adapted from A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition. Like a pack of wolves, tiny bacteria band together to hunt their evasive prey. In the soil underfoot, a nematode (“round worm”) avoids a deadly chemical. A cell runs toward oxygen to take part in photosynthesis and make the planet habitable by humans[1]. Brightly colored water droplets animate and chase each other across a glass landscape[2]. These are a few of the amazing microscopic dramas that occur just out of range of sight. Microbes and even non-living molecules use DSRP to sense and respond to their environment in a process called chemotaxis.

    • Derek Cabrera, PhD
      Derek Cabrera, PhD
    Teaching

    Teach Your Child to Think

    There are moments in life when we instinctively know that our life is changing and that a corollary transformation of ourselves is underway. I am sure that every parent remembers with great clarity the moment that the totality of becoming a parent hit them. Never is there such a crystallization of absolute joy and heart stopping fear. The enormity of the responsibility of parenthood weighs on us before a child arrives in our home. Yet, we embrace the joy, face that fear, and take the responsibility head on to do what our instincts tell us to do as biological beings raising our young.

    • Laura Cabrera, PhD
      Laura Cabrera, PhD
    Culture

    Core Tenets of Organizational Culture

    This post is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Flock Not Clock. Members of your organization will share a large number of mental models, all of varying importance and centrality to the organization and its success. So what are the most important mental models—the pillars of your culture? Where do you focus first and foremost? Organizational success depends on sharing the right mental models, ones that are complexity-friendly and promote learning and adaptation.

    • Derek & Laura Cabrera
      Derek & Laura Cabrera
    Learning

    Learn by Example

    One of the specific and practical things you can do to build a culture of mental models is to get the entire leadership team to assume another as leaders of learning. The CEO must also serve as a Chief Learning Officer (CLO). This dual role is required not just of CEOs but of any leader across the organization. If managers make learning a priority, others will see it as a priority, too. Effective leaders are skilled “lead learners” adroit at inculcating culture (facilitating shared understanding of key mental models).

    • Derek & Laura Cabrera
      Derek & Laura Cabrera