How the System Dynamics Society Came to Be:
A Collective Memoir
David Andersen, John Morecroft, and Roberta Spencer
with
Jay Forrester, Michel Karsky, Bernard Paulré, Jack Pugh, Michael Radzicki,
Jorgen Randers, George Richardson, Khalid Saeed, and Eric Wolstenholme
Keywords: System Dynamics Society, history, founding, volunteering, Dynamica,
constitution, early conferences
Abstract: In this paper several of the early workers in the field of system dynamics tell
both a consensus story of how the System Dynamics Society came into being over 25 years
ago and some of the early history of the Society itself. Several slightly different versions of
this story have been told over the past several years and we thought it would be interesting
to involve a broader group in this kind of modified oral history project. The paper is
based on a series of separate written recollections that have been posted in full on the web
at http: //www.systemdynamics.org/history/oral_history.htm.
Introduction
The 2007 International Conference of the System Dynamics Society in Boston marks the
50" anniversary of our field and the silver anniversary of the System Dynamics Society.
Over the years several slightly different, partial stories have been told about how the
Society was founded. For example, some persons recall 1983 and others 1982 as the
founding date (a lawyer might look at the incorporation papers for the Society and discover
a yet later date of November 1985). These slight differences in memory occur because so
many persons were involved in the founding and launching of the Society, its conferences,
and its journal. This paper brings together recollections from a number of these early
workers in the field in an attempt to align their collective mental models. We hope that
you enjoy these collective memories.
The Founding Events
In 1983, 120 delegates to the system dynamics research conference held at Pine Manor
College, Chestnut Hill, just outside Boston unanimously passed a resolution affirming the
creation of the System Dynamics Society and naming Jay Forrester as the first president.
However, this resolution was actually the reaffirmation of a similar resolution to create a
society passed at the Association Francaise pour la Cybemétique Economique et
Technique (AFCET) conference in Brussels during the summer of 1982. Between 1982
and 1983, an energetic team organized the 1983 research conference at Pine Manor
College and managed to initiate the first annual offering of the Jay W. Forrester A ward,
evidence that some sort of an informal society was already functioning in 1982 but without
the benefit of a constitution or officers.
Those with long enough memories recall Jean Lebel at a small meeting in Rensselaerville
New Y ork in 1981 calling for the creation of the “Trans- National Society of System
Dynamics” making public a private conversation that had begun at the Paris conference in
1980. Lebel also invited those present at Rensselaerville to join him and his European
partners the next summer in 1982. In a prescient twist of fate, Roberta Spencer was the
young staff person who helped to organize the meeting in 1981.’
Even though the Society was officially acclaimed into existence in 1983, it took some
years to get its operations in order. The first issue of the System Dynamics Review arrived
in summer 1985. The very first issue of the System Dynamics Review incorporated the
backlog from Dynamica into its first issues. At the same time, Eric Wolstenholme,
outgoing editor of Dynamica, became the inaugural editor of the System Dynamics Review
working with George Richardson, the newly-formed Society’s vice president for
publications and chair of its publications committee.
Below we present a set of collective memories that tell some of the history leading up to
these founding events and then trace some of the major directions of the Society, its
research conference, its publications, and other activities since the founding.
Key Events Leading up to the Founding Events
Since its founding at the Pine Manor College in 1983, two key activities of the System
Dynamics Society have been to hold an annual research conference and to sponsor high
quality publications to document research results in the field. Both of these activities were
well developed before the Society was founded.
Precursor conference-related events
The 1983 Pine Manor conference represented the inter-twining of several until then distinct
conference traditions in the field of system dynamics. Michel Karsky and Bemard Paulré
recall that the first conference focused fully on system dynamics was organized by Jean
Lebel in Toulouse. The year was 1975. As shown in Table 1, a continuing stream of
research conferences, held mostly in France and Belgium, led directly to the Pine Manor
Conference in 1983.
Table 1: System Dynamics C onferences
Pre-Dating the Creation of the System Dynamics Society (1975-1983) ”
' Fora slightly different published history of the Society see Coyle and Morecroft (1999)
* For a list of conference sites see http://www.systemdynamics.org/SD S% 20PC% 20W eb/confsite.htm
Place Year | Chairman/Organizer Comments
Toulouse, France [1975 | Jean Lebel Decision made to hold annual SD conferences
Grenoble, France |1976 | F. Rechenmann Conference held same summer as Geilo conference
Geilo, Norway 1976 | Jorgen Randers and Leif | Financed by Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish
Ervik technical research councils. Led to publication of
Elements of the System Dynamics Method.
Solaize (Lyon), 1977 | Michel Karsky First non-French participants: Aracil (Spain),
France DeBruyn (Belgium)
Rouen, France 1978 | Joel de Rosnay Conference by Joel de Rosnay, who was one of the
first to explain System Dynamics to French readers
in an important book, The Macroscope.
Mons, Belgium {1979 |P. Couvreur and Van Presentations by (among others) Prigogine, G.
Snyck
Coyle, B. Parker, J. Sharp, B. Dangerfield, H.
Krallman, Hurtubise, and first American
Participant— David Peterson (with two
presentations)
Paris, France
1980
Berard Paulré
(sponsored by AFCET)
Presentations by (among others) J. Forrester, J.
Rahn, St. Beer, R. Day, S. des Clers, and B.
Richmond. [In fact there are 26 named authors].
Led to the Publication of System Dynamics and the
Analysis of Change.
Rensselaerville,
New Y ork USA
1981
David Andersen and
John Morecroft
First North American conference devoted.
exclusively to System Dynamics. Jean Lebel
proposes that a formal System Dynamics Society be
created.
Brussels, Belgium
1982
Bernard Paulré
“From physical sciences to social sciences— 7™
Intemational Conference on SD” (Sponsored by
Universities of Bruxelles, Liege, and Mons, AFCET
and SOGESCI)
Pine Manor,
Chestnut Hill,
Boston USA
1983
John Morecroft, David
Andersen and Jack Pugh
Conference followed the Rensselaerville (North
American) and Brussels (European) conferences and
created the System Dynamics Society.
Karsky and Paulré (2007) can trace the origins of the System Dynamics Society to this
early stream of conferences.
“As can be seen from the above list [Table 1], the international aspect of these
annual conferences, as well as the idea of an international SD Society, developed
progressively, through a slow maturing process. The suggestion to create a SD
International organisation was first proposed by Jean Lebel and Bernard Paulré
during the Paris conference of 1980, at a cocktail organised by the MIT club in
honor of Jay Forrester and during the conference in an aside room in the University
Paris Dauphine. This idea was pursued and developed at the Rensselaerville
conference by Jean Lebel and formalized in Brussels in 1982.”
Others recall their first conference experiences in system dynamics taking place in 1976 in
Geilo, Norway. The Geilo conference was sponsored by Norway’s Resource Policy Group
and took place at just about the same time that Rechenmann was organizing a second
European conference in Grenoble. Jorgen Randers (2007) recalls the Geilo conference.
“In 1974 the Resource Policy Group was established in Oslo, Norway as one of the
first centers of system dynamics research outside the US. The initiator was Jorgen
Randers, who had spent the preceding 4 years in the System Dynamics Group at
MIT. By the spring of 1976 the Resource Policy Group had grown to some 7 full
time system dynamicists. In Bergen, Norway Leif Ervik was in full swing in his
effort to establish the second Norwegian system dynamics center. Ervik had spent 2
years in the Dartmouth SD group, and thus the Norwegian centers were tightly
coupled to the American SD effort.
The Norwegian centers were largely financed by the Norwegian, Swedish and
Danish technical research councils. The councils were used to the idea of ‘summer
schools’ to advance science, and thus the idea emerged that it might help further the
field of SD to organize an international conference on Norwegian soil. The decision
to go was made by Randers and Ervik in the winter of 1975-76 and the mountain
resort of Geilo (a political compromise: mid-way between Oslo and Bergen) was
chosen as the venue. Bente Jones and Carsten Tank-Nielsen in the Resource Policy
Group did an enormous amount of work in order to organize the conference, and a
scientific committee did a great job in obtaining 37 papers from scientists from
Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, and the
US. Impressively, these papers were published in a pre-conference document dated
May 27, 1976 and mailed to all conference participants for perusal prior to the
actual conference August 8 -15, 1976.” A selection of these papers was later
published in Elements of the System Dynamics Method (1980). The picture below
[Figure 1] indicates there were more than 70 participants.”
Figure 1: Attendees at the Geilo Conference, August 1976
Fora key to “who is who” see http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/geilo_1976_2b.jpg
While European centers were doing a good job organizing system dynamics research
conferences, attendance by North Americans at these conferences was quite limited (with
the possible exception of the Geilo conference) and no single conference in North
America emerged as a uniquely system dynamics conference. Persons interested in
system dynamics formed small special interest groups at conferences sponsored by the
Society for Computer Simulation, the IEEE Section on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,
and the annual Pittsburgh Simulation Conference. Jack Pugh remembers that the Summer
Computer Simulation Conference (sponsored by SCS) regularly had a separate session on
system dynamics, which was attended by Americans who were reluctant to afford the trip
to Europe. Andersen, Morecroft, and Spencer (2007) recall an effort to create a
conference devoted only to system dynamics at Rensselaerville, NY in 1981.
“The initial idea to hold a conference in North America exclusively devoted to
system dynamics was first discussed in 1980 at the IEEE meetings held in
Cambridge. We recall that Peter Senge, Alan Graham, and others had organized a
special track of papers in system dynamics as part of the section on Systems, Man,
and Cybernetics. At an informal dinner held at the MIT Faculty Club, several
persons attending this meeting floated the idea of holding a meeting exclusively
devoted to system dynamics, much as had been done at the Geilo meetings in
Norway several years before. It fell to John Morecroft, who was an assistant
professor at the Sloan School and to David Andersen who was an assistant
professor at the Graduate School of Public A ffairs, University at Albany to follow
through on this idea.
This first conference consisted of 20 papers presented in plenary and 53 papers
presented in parallel sessions. The printed proceedings ran to 350 pages and
contained a wide variety of topics, broadly representing the field around the world.
We recall that Ed Roberts presented a plenary talk at the 1981 Rensselaerville
meeting that envisioned “The Third Wave” of researchers in system dynamics. The
second wave represented a small number of researchers who had come to know and
work with system dynamics by working directly with Jay Forrester at MIT.
Roberts saw at this conference a much larger wave of researchers who had
connected to the field in multiple other ways, previewing the dawn of a larger view
of the field. Jean Lebel, who had been attending the system dynamics meetings
sponsored by AFCET, gave a major address where he called for the creation of a
‘Transnational Society of System Dynamics.’ He invited all present to come to
Brussels the next year to attend the 1982 AFCET conference that was scheduled to
have many papers from around the world on system dynamics... .”
The annual system dynamics research conferences, begun in 1983 and since then
sponsored by the Society, blended features from these several traditions and have routinely
rotated around the globe.
Publications prior to the System Dynamics Review
As was the case with research conferences, the System Dynamics Society inherited a
number of on-going publications. Jay Forrester (2007) recalls the history of the D-Memo
series (now available on DVD from the System Dynamics Society) as the earliest record of
research in the field of system dynamics.
“The MIT D-memos in system dynamics have a history that started in the 1940s at
the MIT Digital Computer Laboratory. At that time I had a large staff of engineers
designing and building Whirlwind, the first digital computer at MIT. To coordinate
the group, I had every technical note serial numbered, distributed to all members
for coordination of activity, and filed for future reference and as a record of
progress. That practice was re-established for activities in system dynamics
starting with D-0 in November 1956. That first D-memo was my note to the
faculty research seminar on ‘Dynamic Models of Economic Systems and Industrial
Organizations,’ which evolved into the beginning of system dynamics. That
original memo was published in the Winter 2003 (Volume 19, Number 4) issue of
the System Dynamics Review. D-5 in 1957 described how the memos would be
formatted, distributed, and filed. In the 1990s the MIT group had begun to fragment
and the D-memo procedure faltered as memoranda and working papers were
handled in various ways. The last D-memo on the DVD disk is my D-4886-1 of
July 21, 2003, ‘Economic Theory for the New Millennium’ presented at the 2003
International System Dynamics Conference. As the D-memo era came to a close,
the D-memos were scanned and have been preserved in the DVD disk that is
available from the System Dynamics Society.
The System Dynamics Newsletter, which was first called the Industrial Dynamics
Newsletter, appears to have started before 1968 as inferred from reference to it in
D-1169 of October 1968. The asserted purpose of the Newsletter was:
1. to provide information about a wide range of investigations, teaching
activities, and applications within the emerging system dynamics profession,
2. to facilitate and stimulate communication among system dynamics
practitioners, and
3. to furnish an updated bibliography of books, articles, and theses which deal
with topics in system dynamics.
In 1973 the Newsletter had 79 pages. By 1985 it had grown to 196 pages. The
1985 Newsletter contained sections on system dynamics at MIT, system dynamics
teaching at 31 other institutions, system dynamics research at 43 other institutions,
a list of 67 MIT theses, and 105 pages of system dynamics bibliography.
The Newsletter was discontinued when the System Dynamics Review and other
publications made it unnecessary.”
However, as was the case with research conferences, a parallel publication tradition had
emerged, this time in the UK. Eric Wolstenholme (2007) recalls the early history of
Dynamica, the journal that preceded the System Dynamics Review.
“The story of Dynamica and its development into the System Dynamics Review is
very closely intertwined with the evolution of the Bradford University System
Dynamics Group.
The group was formed by Geoff Coyle in 1970 and, mirroring the foundations of
the subject, reported to the University’s Department of Control Engineering. The
first 5 years saw the group build up to 3 members of staff and 9 graduate students
studying for PhDs. Early successes were reflected in two important decisions in
1975. First, the group was consolidated into the newly formed Bradford
Management Centre and second a decision was made to establish a journal
dedicated to group research output. The rationale for the creation of Dynamica is
best captured in the forward to the first edition by Chris Higgins the Director of the
Management Centre who stated:
‘The System Dynamics Group has now grown into one of the most
enterprising and innovative research groups in the University. Its
reputation has been recognised by the award of a number of
substantial research grants and it has now reached the stage of
development where a substantial stream of publications is anticipated.
It is apposite that a new journal Dynamica should be instigated by the
Unit.’
Editorial responsibility for the journal was given to Graham Winch, and Graham
and John Sharp ran the publication until 1980. During this period the journal did
indeed fulfill its promise of being a prestigious outlet for dissemination of the
research of the group across a wide range of studies.”
Even with the creation of Dynamica, Khalid Saeed (2007) recalls how the search for peer-
reviewed publication outlets before the existence of the System Dynamics Review took
authors to multiple journals as outlets.
“Itis always difficult for the students of a new emerging discipline to publish in
recognized peer reviewed fora. Given that there was a substantial publication
requirement in our doctoral program, it was important to find a journal that would
be receptive to our articles and would have the expertise to judge their content. It is
not surprising that our earliest publications went to IEEE Transactions and
Simulation, both dominated by engineers but not limited to engineering agendas.
My first paper, coauthored with Tony Picardi, was published in Simulation. Other
journals my students and I targeted after I graduated included Technological
Forecasting and Social Change, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, and World
Development.”
These multiple streams of publication outlets for work in the field of system dynamics
ultimately led to the creation of the System Dynamics Review.
Key Events Subsequent to the Founding Events
The 1983 resolution proclaiming the System Dynamics Society into existence with a full
slate of officers intact (see the addendum: “First Officers of the Society”
www.systemdynamics.org/history/1st-officers.htm) begged a significant number of legal,
organizational, logistical, financial, and even political questions. What would be the legal
structure of the society? How should it be organized and how would it function given that
it had no funding? A delicate political question centered on how to harmoniously balance
the interests and preferences of all those who had contributed to the founding with those of
a single dominant founding group— the System Dynamics Group at MIT. Coyle and
Morecroft (1999) recount how some of these issues were resolved.
It fell to the four elected officers of the Society most closely located to Cambridge to work
on these issues. Jack Pugh, with an established operating base at Pugh Roberts Associates,
set up an accounting system and laid the groundwork for future sound financial
management of the Society. Jack then gave the Society a boost when he recruited his wife,
Julie, to serve as the first executive director of the Society. In addition, Jack Pugh (2007)
recalls the task of creating a legal basis for the Society.
“When we gathered in Jay’s office to organize the Society, one of the first tasks
was to create a constitution. As no one else had any lawyers to suggest I
recommended an acquaintance of mine. He produced a document that Jay totally
disapproved of (for reasons that I do not recall). As this lawyer was not a specialist
in professional societies, we began studying the constitutions of other such
organizations. The constitution of The Institute of Management Science appealed to
us. So we adapted it to what we felt that we needed. As it has been modified several
times since then it is obvious that we did not do a perfect job, although we have
grown twenty fold in twenty-five years.”
As founding president, Jay Forrester was given the diplomatic task of contacting leaders of
the active groups around the world to secure their support for and cooperation with the new
Society. As secretary, John Morecroft, a newly minted assistant professor at MIT, took on
the job of recording key aspects of the Society’s history (see Morecroft 1983A and
1983B). In addition, Morecroft took on, with David Andersen, the task of initially drafting
and managing many of Jay’s letters and external correspondence on behalf of the Society.
We all had a fear (subsequently discovered to be unfounded) that Jay’s well-known strong
personality and ability to take a firm position on any given issue might impede his role as a
diplomat on behalf of the Society. Mike Radzicki (2006) in his presidential address to the
Society’s annual research conference tells the story of how he found copies of these
Forrester-A ndersen-Morecroft diplomatic collaborations in the earliest archives from the
Society. Apparently their collaborations were successful. However, we recall that the
Society did inherit an implicit European-North American tension from the way it was
founded with a friction around the MIT-centric nature of the emerging society. This
tension still seems to play itself out over the issue of conference scheduling, especially
when the Society chooses to mount a conference outside the traditional European- North
American rotation.
David Andersen, then serving as president-elect, helped these efforts along by scheduling a
series of monthly meetings during the academic year when all of the volunteers working to
lay the groundwork of the Society would meet, usually in Jay Forrester’s office at MIT.
His job was to drive in from Albany, New Y ork to help create a sense of pace and deadline
to the various jobs being completed by early volunteers.
Michael Radzicki, (2007) recalls the voluntary nature of early Society business, noting,
“The early operations of the central office were primarily undertaken by whoever
held the following Society positions: Vice President for Finance, Secretary, and
Executive Director. The vice president for finance kept the books, met annually
with the auditor to make sure the Society was complying with U.S. tax laws, and
made sure the Society’s modest endowment was properly earning interest. The
secretary kept the minutes of the policy council meetings, helped the president set
the agenda for the meetings, and was typically the person who best remembered
what the policy council had done in the past and was scheduled to do in the future.
The executive director essentially did everything else. In fact, the people filling
these three roles typically served multiple terms in office and basically were
unofficially responsible for the early institutional memory of the Society.”
As the Society came into existence, the need for an official peer-review publication that
could set standards in the field became apparent. George Richardson (2007) tells the story
of how the System Dynamics Review was born.
“Tt was late at night (well, early in the moming) at the 1984 System Dynamics
Conference in Oslo at a particularly convivial and well-lubricated gathering of
participants, that David A ndersen, in his role as the 1985 President of the newly
formed System Dynamics Society, asked me to serve as the Society’s first vice
president for publications, with the charge of bringing into being the journal of the
Society. Given the hour and heady spirits of the evening, I said I’d be happy to do
it.
Under the broad direction of the Society’s Publication Committee, consisting of Jay
Forrester, Eric Wolstenholme, David Andersen, Richard Day, and me, plans for the
as yet unnamed journal began shortly after the conference.
With a small group of student supporters in the MIT System Dynamics Group
(Becky Waring and Janet Gould), I sought publishers. We began with an
appropriately long list, and rather quickly winnowed it down to three, MIT Press,
and the U.S. offices of Elsevier, and John Wiley.... By May 1985 we had reached
the stage of comparing draft contract agreements with these publishers, when, to
my constemation, all three dropped out.
Ina stroke of great good fortune, the editor at MIT Press put us in touch with Laura
Fillmore and her then little company called Editorial Inc. Laura saved the day. She
linked me with a designer, Larry Brown, and a copy editor, Alice Cheyer, and
worked with me to find a printer. We began the process of publishing the Review
ourselves, as a wholly owned operation of the System Dynamics Society.
10
The tasks of establishing the editorial structure and the contents of the first issue
were made every so much easier by Eric Wolstenholme, who did (at least) two
great things for the new journal. First, Eric accepted the nomination to be the
Review’ s first executive editor, a post he went on to serve in for six years. Second,
he agreed to support the new Society and its new journal by ending the publication
of Dynamica and turning over its entire paper backlog to the System Dynamics
Review.
The arrangement with Editorial Inc, particularly Laura Fillmore and A lice Cheyer,
continued for seven years. Eric handled the content of each issue and the review
processes, and I handled getting each one produced and mailed. It was a somewhat
unusual editorial arrangement, for I was the one who worked with Alice as she
copy-edited everything that would go into the Review. Alice was amazing. (There
are many Alice stories, but perhaps the best is the time she found in a complicated
model diagram an arrow with the arrow head on the wrong end. To this day I have
no idea how she did that.) We worked together on every article for seven years,
often on every sentence in each article, and that entire time we never met.
As the Review became more famous, we came to the attention of Diane Taylor at
John Wiley & Sons in Chichester, who wanted to publish the Review. After more
than a year of negotiations, involving most of the early founders of the Society and
the then current policy council, the Society agreed to an arrangement in which
Wiley in the UK would publish the Review ... .”
The story of the founding of the Society would not be complete without a brief description
of the transition from a voluntary enterprise to an organization with professional staff. In
the 1992 winter policy council meeting there were discussions about the Society selling the
vinyl] board version of the beer game as discussed by Martinez-Moyano et al. (2005). Julie
Pugh had managed the packaging and sales of these games over the years and this was the
primary activity that contributed approximately one-third in the accumulation of close to
$150,000 cash surplus for the Society by 1996. Jack and Julie Pugh were by this point in
their careers considering retirement and were seeking an alternative to their continuing
volunteer service to the Society.
Also in 1996, Roberta Spencer, David Andersen, and George Richardson had been
reunited at the University at Albany where Roberta was working on a part-time basis on a
number of research grants. Looking at the modest cash balance in the Society’ s reserves,
the University at Albany proposed a plan that would allow the Society to move its home
office from MIT (and Julie Pugh’s basement) to Albany with Roberta Spencer serving as
its first professional staff person, replacing Julie Pugh as executive director. David
Andersen was nominated to replace Jack Pugh as vice president for finance, a post that he
has held since that time. Since then, the trajectory of growth can be traced on the Society
web site (www.systemdynamics.org). From its initial founding, the Society has grown due
11
to the heroic efforts of too may volunteers to mention here. This should be the subject of a
future oral history project.
Addendum: First 0 fficers of the Society
President: Jay W. Forrester (1983-1984)
President Elect: David F. Andersen (1983-1984)
Past President: None
Secretary: John D. W. Morecroft (1983-1984)
Treasurer: Alexander L. Pugh, III (1983-1984)
Vice President: Jorgen Randers (1983-1984)
Vice President: Jean D. Lebel (1983-1984)
Policy Council (1983-1984): R. Geoffrey Coyle, Frank P. Davidson, Richard H. Day,
Willard R. Fey, Nathan B. Forrester, Roger I. Hall, Michel Karsky, Hermann Krallmann,
Dennis L. Meadows, Pratap K. J. Mohapatra, R. Joel Rahn, Barry M. Richmond, Edward
B. Roberts, Khalid Saeed, John J. Uhran, Jr., Eric F. Wolstenholme
Brief Author Bios (in alphabetical order)
David Andersen was the President-Elect at the founding of the System Dynamics Society
and presently serves as the Vice President for Finance.
Jay Forrester is the founder of the field of system dynamics and the founding President of
the System Dynamics Society.
Michel Karsky organized the 1977 system dynamics meetings, was a founding member of
the System Dynamics Society, and has served as Vice President of Member
Activities.
John Morecroft was the founding Secretary of the System Dynamics Society and served
as President in 1996. He has also served as Vice President Publications.
Bernard Paulre organized the 1981 System Dynamics meetings on Brussels and was a
founding member of the System Dynamics Society
Jack Pugh was the Vice President for Finance at the founding of the System Dynamics
Society and continued in that role until 1997. He also served as President in 1999.
Mike Radzicki was Secretary of the System Dynamics Society between 1995 and 2000
and served as its President in 2006.
Jorgen Randers organized the Geilo conference in 1975 and served as the President of the
Society in 1985.
George Richardson was a founder of the System Dynamics Review and President of the
Society in 1997. He also served as the founding Vice President Publications.
Khalid Saeed was a founding member of the System Dynamics Society and a member of
the Policy Council. He served as President in 1995.
Roberta Spencer organized the 1981 meetings in Rensselaerville, New Y ork and has
served as Executive Director of the Society since 1997.
Eric Wolstenholme was the editor of Dynamica and the founding editor of the System
Dynamics Review, serving as President of the Society in 1989.
12
References
Andersen, David, John Morecroft and Roberta Spencer. (2007). “The 1981 Conference in
Rensselaerville”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/the_1981_rensselaerville_conference.pdf)
Coyle, RG and John Morecroft, editors. (1999). “System Dynamics for Policy, Strategy
and Management Education.” Journal of the Operational Research Society, 50(4).
Forrester, Jay. (2007). “The MIT D-memos and System Dynamics Newsletters”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/d-memos_newsletters.pdf)
Karsky, Michel and Bernard Paulré. (2007). “Early Developments of the System
Dynamics Venture”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/early_developments.pdf)
Martinez-Moyano, Ignacio with R. Joel Rahn and Roberta Spencer. (2005). “The Beer
Game: Its History and Rule Changes”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2005/proceed/papers/MA RT1473.pdf)
Morecroft, John. (1983A). “Report on the 1983 Intemational System Dynamics
Conference, (Pine Manor College) Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, July 27-30, 1983”, D-
3482, MIT System Dynamics Group, Cambridge MA. Also published in Dynamica 9 Part
Il, 97-99, Winter 1983.
http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/oral_history.htm See ‘Other History Documents’
Morecroft, John. (1983B). Archive documents from an early meeting of the Society’s
Executive Committee on 28” November 1983.
http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/oral_history.htm See ‘Other History Documents’
Paulré, Bernard, ed. (1981). System Dynamics and the Analysis of Change. Proceedings
of the 6" Intemational Conference on System Dynamics, University of Paris-Dauphine,
November 1980, North Holland, Amsterdam.
Pugh, Alexander. (2007). “The Origin of our Constitution”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/origin_of_constitution.pdf)
Radzicki, Michael. (2007). “The Early Years: A Voluntary Effort”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/the_early_years_voluntary_effort.pdf)
Radzicki, Michael. (2006). Presidential A ddress
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/newsletters/President%27sA ddress2006.pdf)
13
Randers, Jorgen, editor. (1980). Elements of the System Dynamics Method. MIT Press
(now published by Pegasus Communications, Waltham MA).
Randers, Jorgen. (2007). “The 1976 Intemational Conference on System Dynamics”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/geilo_1976_conference_history.pdf)
Richardson, George P. (2007). “The Founding of the System Dynamics Review”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/founding_of_review.pdf)
Saeed, Khalid. (2007), “System Dynamics Beginnings— Some Recollections”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/system_dynamics_beginnings.pdf)
Spencer, Roberta. (2007) “The First Executive Director, Julie Pugh, and the transition from
a voluntary enterprise” (http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/1stED.htm)
Wolstenholme, Eric. (2007). “From Dynamica to the System Dynamics Review”
(http://www.systemdynamics.org/history/dynamica_sdr.pdf)
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