Introduction to the speech of John
Richardson as he accepted the System
Dynamics Society 2013 Lifetime
Achievement Award
Dennis Meadows
Cambridge, MA, 23 July, 2013
Over the years | have spoken often to the participants of this annual
meeting. None of those earlier presentations has given me as much
pleasure as being invited today to introduce this year’s Lifetime
Achievement Award winner, John Richardson.
Many, many people in this room have devoted their professional lives to
practicing, teaching, and promoting our field. They have accomplished a
great deal, and their work will endure. Thus to be singled out as a recipient
of our society’s Lifetime Achievement award is an incredible honor.
| will not use my few minutes to justify John’s award. The reputation of the
commitee and the substance of John’s talk about his work will do that well
enough. Instead | will talk briefly about the larger context of his
professional life. Today John will describe three of his projects that lead to
significant books. It is important to understand that those examples are
only a very small part of the results from his incredibly diverse and
productive career. In his work, extending more than half a century, John
has accomplished much and been many things. But throughout it all he
has been a learner, a meticulous scientist, and a consummate teacher.
John has a wonderful curiosity; he is always eager to acquire new
insights. | first met him in 1973 when we served as a faculty members in a
two-week workshop in Hannover, Germany. The session was created to
ask how system dynamics models could give insights about global
problems. Interest in that question has been an important foundation of his
career. That question also lead John to participate in the first Balaton
Group meeting in 1982. The Balaton Group is an informal network of 50
individuals from 30 nations that meets every year for five days, so that its
members can teach each other about problems and prospects for the
globe’s natural resources and environment. His continued interest in
learning will take him to the Group’s 32nd meeting in Hungary this autumn.
He is a meticulous social scientist. For his study of war and peace in Sri
Lanka, John visited that nation frequently over a period of 20 years,
meeting the key participants in the strife and compiling a massive data
base on conflict that will long remain an important resource for
professionals in many fields.
John is a skilled and dedicated teacher. He taught system dynamics to his
American University students until he retired from that faculty. For him
mentoring was not just a 9-5 job. At American University he took an
apartment in the school’s dormitory, so that he could be a counselor for
his students around the clock.
He co-directed a week-long course on system dynamcis in Portugal to a
group of young leaders active in environmental issues. He created a
formal briefing on hunger, and trained teachers who eventually took it to
thousands of concerned citizens around the world.
Now at the age of 75, he is about to start a two-year contract teaching
Asian students the principles of our field at a university in Singapore. And
at the same time he is convincing that country’s leaders about the merits of
the approach, so that his students will have jobs when they graduate.
| have liked and admired John for over 40 years. As he comes up to
speak, | ask you to join me in applauding his many contributions.
The 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award
Citation for the Winner: John Richardson
The System Dynamics Society occasionally recognizes outstanding contributions to
the field through a Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is given to an individual based
on work done over the course of a career and not on a single work. This award has only been
given twice before, to Geoff Coyle in 1998, and to Diana Fisher in 2011. It is an honor for
me today, on behalf of the Forrester Award Committee, to present the third lifetime
achievement award in our history to John Richardson, for his decades of work on sustainable
development and public policy.
John is going to speak about his career, followed by some time for questions from the
audience. But first, I’d like to say a few more words of introduction, and then I'll tum the
podium over to John’s long-time friend and colleague, Dennis Meadows, so that he can offer
some personal reflections on John’s career.
John describes the principal goal of his work, spanning 40 years, as making the results
of rigorous public policy analysis widely accessible to policymakers and wider publics.
Toward that end, he has written many publications, including six books, and has consulted
with governments and organizations on four continents. He has also served on the faculty at
three different universities, as both a teacher and an administrator, and has won numerous
previous awards for his scholarship and his university service, especially for his 30 years at
American University in Washington DC, where he was named Professor Emeritus in 2012.
John is currently Visiting Professor at the Lee Kuan Y ew School of Public Policy at the
National University of Singapore.
And now, I'd like to invite Dennis to the podium.
