Journal ArticleDOI
Counterintuitive behavior of social systems
TLDR
In this paper, the authors address several issues of broad concern in the United States: population trends, the quality of urban life, national policy for urban growth, and the unexpected, ineffective, or detrimental results often generated by government programs in these areas.Abstract:
This paper addresses several issues of broad concern in the United States: population trends; the quality of urban life; national policy for urban growth; and the unexpected, ineffective, or detrimental results often generated by government programs in these areas. The author does attempt to indicate how multiloop feed-back systems (to which our social systems belong) mislead us because our intuition and judgement have been formed to expect behavior different from that actually possessed by such systems. At times programs cause exactly the reverse of desired results. It is now possible to explain how such contrary results can happen. There are fundamental reasons why people misjudge the behavior of social systems. There are orderly processes at work that frequently lead people to wrong decisions when faced with complex and highly interacting systems. Until we come to a much better understanding of social systems, we should expect that attempts to develop corrective programs will continue to disappoint us.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Learning in and about complex systems
TL;DR: Change is accelerating, and as the complexity of the systems in which the authors live grows, so do the unanticipated side effects of human actions, further increasing complexity.
Journal ArticleDOI
Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error
TL;DR: This paper explored how group-and organizational-level factors affect errors in administering drugs to hospitalized patients and found that patient care groups in two hospitals showed systematic differences not just in the frequency of errors, but also in the likelihood that errors will be detected and learned from by group members.
Journal ArticleDOI
System dynamics modeling for public health: background and opportunities.
Jack Homer,Gary B. Hirsch +1 more
TL;DR: System dynamics shows promise as a means of modeling multiple interacting diseases and risks, the interaction of delivery systems and diseased populations, and matters of national and state policy.
Journal ArticleDOI
Organizations Unfettered: Organizational Form in an Information-Intensive Economy
John Child,Rita Gunther McGrath +1 more
TL;DR: The transition from an economy based on materials to an information based on flows of information has created considerable challenges for organization design by unfettering many organizational aspects from physical constraints.
Journal ArticleDOI
Systems thinking and organizational learning: Acting locally and thinking globally in the organization of the future
Peter M. Senge,John D. Sterman +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, a case study focused on improving quality and total cost performance in the insurance industry is presented to illustrate how these tools can both produce insight and focus change, and that simulation is an important element of successful learning laboratories to develop systems thinking and promote organizational learning.
References
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Book
World dynamics
TL;DR: World Dynamics shows the opportunity for bringing the world of man into equilibrium with the forces of his environment while there still remains time and maneuvering room for growth and expansion to give way to equilibrium.