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To get the most out of Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics it is important to develop a good intuitive feel for ‘dynamics’ – how and why things change through time. Personal experience of simulated dynamics is a good way to learn. So the book comes with chapter-by-chapter learning support folders, which are available on the Learners' website (see the About the Website Resources section). Each folder contains models and gaming simulators that allow readers to run simulations for themselves and to reproduce the time charts and dynamics described in the text. The models come to life in a way that is impossible to re-create with words alone. It is easy for readers to spot opportunities for learning support. A spinning gyroscope is printed in the page margin alongside text that explains how to run the simulator.5 Examples include unintended drug-related crime, the collapse of fisheries, perverse hotel showers, persistent manufacturing cycles, boom and bust in new products and services, promising market growth, unfulfilled market growth, competitive dynamics, hospital performance and price volatility in global oil.

There are also PowerPoint slides with notes to accompany the book. They are available on the Instructors' website (see the About the Website Resources section). The slides include lectures and workshops which are organised chapter-by-chapter. They can be supplemented with assignments which are also to be found on the Instructors' website.

There are many ways to use the book, models and slides in university and management education, some of which are outlined below. No doubt instructors will adapt and tailor the materials to suit their own needs, but the following comments may trigger some useful thoughts.

MBA and Modular/Executive MBA

The book is derived from an MBA elective of the same name (Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics SMBD) that I ran at London Business School for many years.6 It therefore has a track record in graduate management education. To run a similar elective course at another business school I recommend starting with the well-known ‘Beer Distribution Game’ in the opening session and then working through a selection of book chapters complemented with workshops and assignments based on the learning support models. The Beer Game is a role-playing exercise for teams of students that examines supply-chain dynamics and coordination problems in a multi-stage production-distribution chain comprising retailers, wholesalers, distributors and a factory. The game can be purchased at modest cost from the System Dynamics Society www.systemdynamics.org and is a vivid way to introduce students to modelling, representation, simulation and puzzling dynamics. On this foundation can be built lectures and workshops that introduce feedback systems thinking and modelling (Chapters 2 and 3); examine the cyclical dynamics of balancing loops (Chapters 4 and 5); and overlay the growth dynamics of reinforcing loops to study limits to growth, stagnation and decline (Chapters 6 and 7). By the end of Chapter 7 students have covered the key concepts required to conceptualise, formulate, test and interpret system dynamics models. Then instructors can select among the applications presented in Chapters 8, 9, and 10 (complemented with system dynamics materials from other sources) to create a complete course with 30 or more contact hours offered in modular or weekly format. The material is best spread out across an academic term or semester to allow adequate time for reading, preparation and model-based assignments.

A full-semester twenty-eight session course suitable for graduate students can be found on the Instructors' website in the folder entitled Course Outlines. A fourteen session taster course specially designed for PhDs can also be found in the same website folder.

Non-Degree Executive Education

Materials from the book have also been successfully used in a popular one-week residential Executive Education programme called Systems Thinking and Strategic Modelling (STSM) which ran at London Business School throughout the 1990s. The purpose of this programme was rather different than a typical MBA course in strategic modelling and business dynamics. Participants were often senior managers and/or their experienced staff advisers. For these people it was important to communicate how they should use modelling and simulation for strategic development and organisational change. Mastering the skills to build models and simulators was secondary to their need for becoming informed model users, by which I mean people capable of initiating and leading strategic modelling projects in their own organisations – as many STSM participants subsequently did. So the programme was designed to emphasise the conceptual steps of model building including problem articulation and causal loop diagramming. The course also provided syndicate teams with a complete, compact and self-contained experience of the steps of a group modelling project from problem definition, to model formulation, testing and simulation. This compact experience was delivered through mini-projects, chosen by the teams themselves, and developed into small-scale models under faculty supervision.

The programme began in the same way as the MBA course, with the Beer Distribution game used as an icebreaker and an entertaining introduction to feedback systems thinking, dynamics and simulation. Participants then learned, through lectures and syndicate exercises, the core mapping and modelling concepts in Chapters 2 and 3. It may seem surprising that executives would take an interest in hotel showers and drug-related crime (the examples in Chapters 2 and 3 that illustrate causal loop diagrams, feedback structure, equation formulation and simulation), but they always did. Real-world applications were then demonstrated with lectures about serious and successful modelling projects such as the Oil Producers' model in Chapter 8 or the Soap Industry simulator in Chapter 10. In addition guest speakers from business or the public sector, sometimes past-participants of STSM, were invited to talk about their experiences with modelling. Participants also spent half a day or more using a strategy simulator such as the People Express Management Flight simulator (referred to in Chapter 6) or the Beefeater Restaurants Microworld, available from www.strategydynamics.com. Working in small teams of three or four, participants discuss and agree a collective strategy for their assigned company and then implement the strategy in the corresponding simulator. Invariably, when dealing with dynamically complex situations, the best laid plans go astray and teams' experiences provide much valuable material for a debriefing on the pitfalls of strategy making. The final two days of the programme are spent on the team mini-projects mentioned above.

Ten and twelve session taster courses suitable for MBAs and Executives can be found on the Instructors' website in the folder entitled Course Outlines.

Undergraduate and Specialist

Masters Courses

I am confident that the content of this book works for MBA and Executive Education. It has also proven to be suitable for undergraduate and specialist masters courses in modelling and simulation. Obviously undergraduates lack the business experience of typical MBAs. They will therefore find it harder to make sense of the coordination problems that routinely crop up in organisations and contribute to puzzling dynamics, chronic underperformance and failures of strategy. Here the book's website models perform a vital function. They bridge the experience gap by enabling younger readers to simulate puzzling dynamics and to experience coordination problems for themselves.

Otherwise the sequencing of materials can be much the same as for an MBA course, with perhaps more emphasis given to non-business examples and cases. For example, it is possible to devote an opening session to the fisheries gaming simulator in Chapter 1 as a replacement for the Beer Distribution Game. Alternatively in order to retain, at the start of the course, a vivid role-playing exercise and social ‘icebreaker’ then simply replace the Beer Game with the Fish Banks simulator. Like the Beer Game, Fish Banks is also available at modest cost from the System Dynamics Society www.systemdynamics.org. The game debrief can be supplemented with the model and materials in Chapter 1. Then after the game, instructors can cover the core modelling Chapters 2 through 5 and selectively add content from Chapters 6 through 10 to suit the audience. For example students who are not especially interested in firm-level business dynamics and strategy may prefer to spend more time on public sector applications in Chapter 9 and on the industry-level simulator of the global oil producers in Chapter 8.

A ten session taster course for Masters in Management students and for undergraduates can be found on the Instructors' website in the folder entitled Course Outlines.

5

A spinning gyroscope is ‘dynamically complex’ and is therefore a good visual metaphor to signal the simulation of dynamics in business and society. A gyroscope behaves in surprising ways. For example, when prodded on its top-most point it moves at right angles to the direction of the push; a counter-intuitive response. A gyroscope is also self-balancing. It stands on a pointed-end, like an upright pencil. Yet instead of falling over, as might be expected, it appears to defy gravity by remaining upright with its axis horizontal; again a counter-intuitive response.

6

Over the years Strategic Modelling has also been taught by Ann van Ackere, Shayne Gary and Scott Rockart, who each brought their own interpretations to the core materials. My thanks to them for the innovations and refinements they introduced.