There are about fifteen known archetypes with an interesting set of relationships among them.

SystemsWiki's Musings

There are about fifteen known archetypes with an interesting set of relationships among them.

There is a new version of this model at

Frequently Recurring Structures

This model is derived from the paper "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement" by Nelson P. Repenning and John D Sterman. See Insight 752 for a causal loop version of this model.

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Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.

There are limits to what one can infer from a qualitative model.

The interaction of a population of Moose and Wolves.

The Home Heating System can be used to demonstrate how we get caught in dilemmas and become victims of ourselves.

What do activities of these images have in common?

Consider the following "Sustaining the Forest" model intended to provide another example of how unexpected the behavior of a web of extended interactions can be.

All the following have a common characteristic.

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

What do activities of these images have in common?

Little Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to Grandma's house. How long will it take?

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

Balancing Loop with Stock & Flow Diagram.

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

While these pictures represent very different things there is a common essence.

Balancing Loop with Stock & Flow Diagram.

The purpose of this model is to have the user change the value of stocks, flows and converters to experience a variety of different graphical results. Understanding this generic model is important pre-requisite to learning about intravenous drugs in the body, radioactivity, self-esteem, water flowing from a drain and many other basic natural systems.

CLD of Eric Wolstenholme Syst. Dyn. Rev. 23, 371–389, (2007) See IM-1008 for a stock flow version.

What's the real difficulty associated with managing time?

All you wanted to do was put a bird feeder in your yard to attract birds and make for a more pleasant morning. And...

All the following have a common characteristic.

Introduce the concept of modeling and simulation.