Social dynamics is the study of the behavior of groups and of the interactions of individual group members, aiming to understand the emergence of complex social behaviors among microorganisms, plants and animals, including humans. It is related to sociobiology but also draws from physics and complex system sciences. In the last century, sociodynamics was viewed as part of psychology, as shown in the work: "Sociodynamics: an integrative theorem of power, authority, interfluence and love". In the 1990s, social dynamics began being viewed as a separate scientific discipline[By whom?]. An important paper in this respect is: "The Laws of Sociodynamics". Then, starting in the 2000s, sociodynamics took off as a discipline of its own, many papers were released in the field in this decade.
System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays.
Peter Michael Senge is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.
The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.
Jay Wright Forrester was a pioneering American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
The word ‘dynamics’ appears frequently in discussions and writing about strategy, and is used in two distinct, though equally important senses.
Business Dynamics is a book by John Sterman that applies system dynamics to business.
Dennis Lynn Meadows is an American scientist and Emeritus Professor of Systems Management, and former director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire. He is President of the Laboratory for Interactive Learning and widely known as a coauthor of The Limits to Growth.
Glen L. Urban has been a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty since 1966 and dean at the school from 1993 to 1998. Urban is a leading educator, prize-winning researcher specializing in marketing and new product development, entrepreneur, and author. He is the Chairman of Sloan's MIT Center for Digital Business.
The bullwhip effect is a supply chain phenomenon where orders to suppliers tend to have a larger variability than sales to buyers, which results in an amplified demand variability upstream. In part, this results in increasing swings in inventory in response to shifts in consumer demand as one moves further up the supply chain. The concept first appeared in Jay Forrester's Industrial Dynamics (1961) and thus it is also known as the Forrester effect. It has been described as "the observed propensity for material orders to be more variable than demand signals and for this variability to increase the further upstream a company is in a supply chain". Research at Stanford University helped incorporate the concept into supply chain vernacular using a story about Volvo. Suffering a glut in green cars, sales and marketing developed a program to sell the excess inventory. While successful in generating the desired market pull, manufacturing did not know about the promotional plans. Instead, they read the increase in sales as an indication of growing demand for green cars and ramped up production.
The System Dynamics Society is an international, nonprofit organization formed in 1983.
Stuart E. Madnick is an American computer scientist, and professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology school of engineering. He is the director of Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS), formerly called the MIT Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity ( ³).
Richard A. D'Aveni is an American academic, thought leader, business consultant, bestselling author and the Bakala Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is best known for creating a new paradigm in business strategy and coining the term “hypercompetition” which led Fortune to liken him to a modern version of Sun Tzu.
John Pourdehnad is an American organizational theorist, and consultant. He is associate director of the Ackoff Center for Advancement of Systems Approaches (ACASA), and Affiliated Faculty in the Organizational Dynamics Graduate Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic, professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and practitioner in the field of future studies. His professional field encompasses model-based futures studies, scenario analysis, system dynamics, sustainability, climate, energy and ecological economics. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome, a company director, member of various not-for-profit boards, business consultant on global sustainability matters and author. His publications include the seminal work The Limits to Growth (co-author), and Reinventing Prosperity.
Barry Marshall Richmond was an American systems scientist, and former managing director of High Performance Systems, Inc (HPS), an organization providing software and consulting services to build the capacity of people to understand and improve the workings of dynamic systems. He is known as a leader in the field of systems thinking and system dynamics and for the development of the STELLA/iThink modelling environment for simulation.
DYNAMO is a simulation language and accompanying graphical notation developed within the system dynamics analytical framework. It was originally for industrial dynamics but was soon extended to other applications, including population and resource studies and urban planning.
Attractiveness Principle is one of System Dynamics archetypes. System archetypes describe common patterns of behavior in dynamic complex systems. Attractiveness principle is a variation of Limits to Growth archetype, with restrictions caused by multiple limits. The limiting factors here are each of different character and usually cannot be dealt with the same way and/or they cannot be all addressed.
Michael S. Scott Morton is a business theorist, and is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management (Emeritus) at MIT Sloan School of Management, known for his contributions to Strategic information systems and benchmarking e-learning.
Hazhir Rahmandad is an Iranian American Scientist and Engineer. Dr. Rahmandad is a dynamic modeling expert. His research applies dynamic modeling to a broad range of problems in strategy, organizational learning, and public health.
