This paper reports on the use of both qualitative modelling (i.e. Journey Making) and quantitative system dynamics simulation modelling for a strategy making process in a UK police force. The main focus of the work is on the tension between the supply of resources (i.e. police officers) and the demands placed on those officers. The strategic conversation that took place was facilitated by 2 modellers - one focussing on managing the strategic enquiry, while the other considered the implications of the conversation for the system dynamics model. Three key strategic conversations emerged: the management of quality with respect to staff, measuring productivity, and the role of public expectations. The work raises issues for both model building processes and the strategic management of any public organization.
Many entrepreneurial successes are attributed to the strong personalities of the new venture leaders, who offer vision, inspire loyalty, and display tenacity in solving problems to achieve their goals. Successful start-up ventures may bias perceptions of the anecdotal benefits of personality-driven leadership in firms too young to have established processes, operationally and organizationally. Those ventures destroyed by the personalities of early leaders, because they no longer exist, offer few anecdotes with which to compare and counter legendary successes such as Apple and its visionary leader Steve Jobs or Amazon and its creative founder Jeff Bezos. This paper advances our thinking about the risks and rewards of personality-driven leadership in start-ups by exploring the dynamics that can arise from heroic leadership gone awry. Building on a case study of a key manager in a medical-device start-up, we identify causal relations and essential dynamics that may bring success to the leader but at the expense of the new ventureâs viability. We discuss insights from the causal loops as they relate to the literature on leadership and outline next steps to advance the research.
This is about the water purification system which named eco-machine system. Based on the Model built by STELLA software, the system is used to simulate the wastewater treatment process of Constructed Wetland. This system can increase the amount of dissolved oxygen and absorb nitrogen and phosphorus. Through analyzing the elements influencing dissolved oxygen, we designed the experiment which is divided into 4 parts of circulation: Aquarium which contains ornamental fish; physical treatment which contains oxygen increasing pump; emerged plant absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus; submerged plant increasing oxygen. The power of pump indicates the speed of circulation of water. The amount of oxygen successfully increases with the help of our water purification system in the lab. We assume that the dissolved oxygen is the dominant indicator of the effluvium, so we consider the increase of the dissolved oxygen as the decrease of the effluvium. Meanwhile, all the cost we need is the electrical energy for operating water pump, some aquatic creatures and water plants. In another words, our eco-machine system is an efficient way to improve the water quality.
The present study undertakes a partial system dynamics (SD) translation of the contemporary biological and psychological conceptualizations of panic disorder (PD). It makes explicit the dynamic processes implicit in the narrative presentations in the literature. It serves as a facilitator for the discussion about PD for it provides an easy-to-understand and illustrative language for commoners to understand, and researchers of different fields to critically examine, the biological, psychological, social and cognitive aspects of PD.
Feedbacks, nonlinearities, and time delays are at the heart of dynamic interactions of socio-economic and biophysical systems. Land use land cover change (LUCC) is a significant component of these dynamic interactions. Land change science community recognized the need to go beyond static depictions of feedback processes. This requires explicit focus on the embedded feedbacks within and across scales as influential, endogenous structural sources of the observed behavior patterns in integrated social and biophysical systems. We present an operational framework that takes its strength from its clear emphasis on nonlinear feedback interactions as drivers of LUCC. The framework addresses both micro- and macro-level processes by employing complementary use of system modeling and spatially-explicit discrete-choice modeling. We demonstrate the potential of the approach on a rapidly urbanizing region, Pearl River Delta (PRD) in South China. To this end, we employ our systemic framework and identify the most influential feedbacks and linkages impacting the urban land conversion over the course of urban and economic growth as experienced in PRD. We also discuss the potential of systems approaches and use of complementary methods in advancing land change science both in theory and in practice. Our remarks, invariably, have implications for sustainability science as well.
The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate, how a dynamic aging chain model can support strategic decisions in personnel planning. More specifically, we use a system dynamics model to improve the recruitment and training process in a large German service provider in the wider field of logistics. The key findings are that the aging chain of service operators within the company is affected by a variety of delays, for instance for training, promotion, and ordering of personnel, and that the structure of the planning process generates cyclic phases of personnel surplus and shortage. The discussion is based on an in-depth case study, which was conducted in the service company in 2008. Implications are that planning processes have to be fine-tuned to account for delays in the aging chain; the simulation model provides a tool for gaining insights into the problem and for improving the actual human resource planning process.
Four major factors affect the performance of project based professional service firms: The ratio of senior to junior staff referred to as the firm's leverage, the average fee charged per unit of time, the percentage of billable time referred to as utilisation, and the profit margin. This paper takes a holistic approach to analysing the performance of these KPI's