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Rosalind Armson
[This guide was originally intended as a chapter in Growing Wings on the Way, but was excluded to avoid the book becoming unduly long. Many of the terms used and a number of references are explained in the book itself. See http://growingwingsontheway.blogspot.com for details.]
I refer in the book to the useful vagueness of the word influences. Systemsdynamics diagrams relate closely to influence diagrams and specify the effect of the influence. An influence diagram can often provide the starting point for a systems-dynamics diagram. A systems-dynamics diagram makes sense of how key variables influence each other in a messy situation. Systems-dynamics diagrams make sense of change, specifically change recognisable in terms of more or less; bigger or smaller; higher or lower; better or worse; expensive or cheap.
dynamics diagrams help identify why things seem to get worse (and may suggest ways in which they could get better) and why some phenomena stay the same, despite efforts to disrupt them. They will also help identify why initial success has not been sustained. Systems-dynamics diagrams draw attention to the subtle effects of interacting influences but they can also form a brief for a computerised model.
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It is important to notice that each arrow has two simultaneous meanings. In Figure 3, the two meanings are: as the tonnes of ash in the airspace increases, it influences the number of flights cancelled to increase as the tonnes of ash in the airspace decrease, it influences the number of flights cancelled to decrease.
Systems-dynamics diagrams with o-arrows (for example, in Figure 4), also carry two simultaneous meanings: as the number of flights cancelled increases, it influences airline revenue to increase. as the number of flights cancelled decreases, it influences airline revenue to decrease.
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Figure 5
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equivalent of an s-arrow connecting the first variable and the last variable in the sequence. 8. A sequence of arrows containing an odd number of o-arrows is the equivalent of an o-arrow. 9. Rewording and changing the arrows may make a sequence easier to understand. Each of these rules is easier to understand with the aid of a diagram and an example. Figure 6 captures Rule 7. The rule does not mean that the intervening variables can, or should, be left out of the diagram but it allows us to determine the effect of variables further back in a sequence.
Figure 6: Equivalences Figure 8 shows an example of changing the words, as allowed in Rule 9. This is useful for eliminating paired o-arrows in favour of easier-tounderstand s-arrows. Figure 9 shows the effect of an odd number of o-arrows in a chain. You can check the effect of Rule 8 by working through each interaction.
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variable D up or down. The diagram does not say which variables effect is stronger so D may go in the same direction as A or in the opposite direction.
11.
A sequence of arrows that forms a loop containing an even number of o-arrows (Figure 11b) or no o-arrows (Figure 11c) is a reinforcing loop whose effect is to reinforce changes in the variables in the loop.
Figure 11: Loop labels The idea of balancing and reinforcing loops is an important one and underlies many complex phenomena. Figure 12 shows a phenomenon I observe at a local coffee house. As the length of the queue increases, customers arriving at the shop notice the queue and often leave again, presumably to go to the coffee house up the road. As the length of the queue gets shorter, the number of people joining it increases again. This is a balancing loop and, in this particular example, tends to stabilise the queue length at around five customers, on a busy day.
If I broaden my observations at the coffee house, I see that, as the queue lengthens, the general level of organisation behind the bar deteriorates and the time it takes to slice cakes, gather clean crockery and grind new bags of coffee increases. This slows the service down and increases the time it takes to serve each customer. Figure 13 shows my extended systems-dynamics diagram. It now includes a reinforcing cycle with two o-arrows. It shows the increasing queue length decreasing the level of organisation, increasing the time taken to complete each order, and lengthening of the queue still further. But any pair of connected variables in a systems-dynamics diagram has two meanings. The reinforcing cycle also shows that if the level of organisation behind the bar increases, perhaps by more tidying and preparation during slack times, then the time it takes to serve customers and their wait time will decrease. This allows the number of customers served each hour to increase. Notice, however that the length of the queue may not decrease significantly: it is stabilised by the balancing loop.
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Figure 13: Service Notice that the wait time for each customer decreases with more baristas available to serve them. But the diagram contains a warning. The reinforcing loop remains in place, even with additional baristas. The diagram suggests that additional baristas might usefully organise and prepare, as soon as the need arises.
Delay
Systems dynamics studies the effect of variables upon each other. It attends particularly to loops of interactions and delays occur between changes. Systems-dynamics diagrams represent time delay by a double slash in the arrow, as shown in Figure 14.
Figure 14: Representing a time delay. Systems dynamics is a huge subject and I cannot do it justice here3. I can however, use a systems-dynamics diagram with loops and a delay to show one of the characteristic phenomena generated by attempts to deal with a messy situation as if it were a difficulty (see Chapter 1 in the book). In Figure 15, attempts to fix problematic symptoms in a messy situation work at first. Because the messy situation has multiple interconnections, the unintended consequences of the quick fix take some time to emerge.
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and how changes at one end influence change at the other. As with influence diagrams, keep asking: What else influences this? and What else does this influence? and asking, of each arrow, whether it is an s-arrow or an oarrow. Sense making is often a case of identifying where there are uncertainties: locating an uncertain relationship is as much an output as a completed diagram.
Naming systems-dynamics diagrams Diagrams with s-arrows and o-arrows have a bewildering variety of names. In the systems-dynamics community, these diagrams are variously known as systems diagrams or causal-loop diagrams. The latter name comes about because systems-dynamics is fundamentally about exploring the effects of loops of elements that lead to change (wanted or unwanted) or to stability (wanted or unwanted.) In the book, I use systems diagrams to mean the whole suite of systemic diagrams. I do not use the term causal-loop diagram because it risks confusion with multiple-cause diagrams, discussed in Chapter 11 of the book. I first encountered systems-dynamics diagrams as sign graphs. Sign graphs have exactly the same intention as the diagrams I describe here but have plus signs instead of s on arrows indicating same-direction change and minus signs instead of o in opposite-direction arrows. This sign convention can be immensely confusing so I now use the s-arrow and o-arrow notation systems-dynamicists use. http://growingwingsontheway.blogspot.com
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Similarly, systems-dynamics diagrams allow rigorous exploration of complex relationships without specifying the variables influence beyond same or opposite direction.
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