On Positioning System Dynamics as an Applied Science of Strategy

摘要

The field of System Dynamics (SD) and strategy practitioners share a common aspiration: tounderstand and control the success and failure of companies through appropriately rigorousmethods. SD practitioners know that it has all the elements of proper scientific method, but generallydo not teach or explain the method with that framework and vocabulary. Outside the field,SD is generally perceived as lacking rigor. This state of affairs has come to be through a kind of“Newton’s law”, where SD started off distant from both academic and corporate strategy, andno outside forces have motivated a rapprochement. The founding of SD in fact predates both theuse of the strategy concept in business, and the knowledge of how to do practical quantitativehypothesis testing for dynamic models with messy data. In the four decades since the founding ofSD, its practitioners have been confronted with a “relevance gap” between themselves and academicstrategy approaches, and a “rigor gap” between themselves and corporate practice ofstrategy “analysis”. These gaps represent lost opportunity for all involved.Positioning System Dynamics as an applied science of strategy would mitigate several of the difficultiesthat SD practitioners face, and create benefits both personal and societal. This repositioningcould be accomplished through 1) teaching and publishing in the explicit language ofiterative hypothesis testing and explicit choice of testing criteria, 2) teaching iteration and testingas the fundamental method, with knowledge of formulation and dynamics as refinements,rather than vice-versa, and 3) explicitly claiming a scientific approach to strategy as an area ofpersonal or organizational competence.