As New Year rolls in, many of us take on challenge of personal change. Many set goals to lose weight; do more exercises; watch less television; do more studying; do less partying; or to shed a habit such as smoking. For several years in our Quality Management course students were asked to work on a term-long personal continuous improvement projects. The students were briefly introduced to basic concepts of causal loop diagrams and were encouraged to use them to clarify their theories regarding their own progress or lack of it. The basic premise is that the result students obtain and the dynamics they experience are built into the structure of their worldview and they learn if they can communicate and influence their worldview. This paper uses systems thinking lens to discuss the improvement framework and the experience reported by students. Majority of students did not make the progress toward their goals as much as they would have preferred. The student generated diagrams to explain their theories were either too simple or overly complicated, awkward and partially flawed. However, it can be claimed that the process of using the tool to clarify their thinking itself was worthwhile. After reviewing their narratives and the diagrams, several archetypes were consistently noted.

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Date created

• 2005 July 17-2005 July 21

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

cc5bb0ac12a5b68b26b1583548898dae

Scope and Contents

Part of

3c582e6f5cf305ef0030c7471b499022

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

Scope and Contents

Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives