Table Of ContentPeter S. Hovmand
Community
Based
System
Dynamics
Community Based System Dynamics
Peter S. Hovmand
Community Based System
Dynamics
Peter S. Hovmand
George Warren Brown School of Social Work
Washington University
St. Louis , MO , USA
ISBN 978-1-4614-8762-3 ISBN 978-1-4614-8763-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8763-0
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
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Pref ace
This book is about describing community-based system dynamics (CBSD), an
approach to doing system dynamics in community settings that has evolved over the
last several years from the work we are doing in the Brown School Social System
Design Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. As interest in these methods has
grown around the world, there has been an increasing demand for resources that
people interested in CBSD can draw on as they move forward in their own initia-
tives in communities.
Among the organizations and communities I have worked over the last 4 years in
developing CBSD, three organizations deserve special mention, for they and the
people they work with have taken risks and informed the methods: the Foundation
for Ecology and Security (FES) in India led by Jagdeesh Rao, West End Mount
Carmel Full Gospel Baptist Church in the West End neighborhood in St.
Louis led by Bishop George White Jr., and the work in Ritenour High School in St.
Louis led by principal Tony Robinson and assistant superintendent Mary Scheetz.
FES works with more than 4,200 villages spread across 7 states of India and is
involved in restoring over half a million acres of common land and in advocating
for better policy and programmatic action for the restoration and conservation of the
commons in the country. For their work, FES was the fi rst recipient of the Elinor
Ostrom International Award on Collective Governance of the Commons for the year
2013. My colleague, collaborator, and dear friend Gautam Yadama introduced me
to Jagdeesh Rao in 2008 as he passed through St. Louis on a visit. Peter Senge’s
book, The Fifth Discipline , had made a deep impression and impacted how FES
operates in seeing people and natural resources as a system, and Jagdeesh was keen
to see how FES could use the methods of system dynamics.
Our fi rst pilot of this approach was in August 2009 and based in a small village
of about 60 households in Boyapalle, Andhra Pradesh, a 3-h drive east from
Bangalore. Gautam and I had already conducted a workshop in the prior year intro-
ducing system dynamics to FES staff and a group of local farmers they were already
working with. Now, the goal was to see if FES could use the tools to engage a new
community that they did not have a preexisting relationship with.
v
vi Preface
Since then, Gautam and I have conducted many workshops in India in collaborations
with colleagues from FES, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Indian Institute for
Technology in Bombay, and PRAYAS based in Pune. The ongoing work with the
Andhra Pradesh cell led by Venkat Dyda is now the home of our annual System
Dynamics Institute in India where students from the Brown School, staff from FES,
and students and faculty from Indian institutions work in transdisciplinary teams to
build system dynamics models with communities on watershed development. These
institutes have been a major driver of innovation for the Social System Design Lab,
our community-based work, and teaching of graduate courses in St. Louis at the
Brown School. Jagdeesh Rao has through many evening conversations never failed
to challenge me to push the approach and description further and was the fi rst to
really call out that what we were trying to do was more than just system dynamics
given the emphasis in our work on advancing social justice.
The West End Mount Carmel Full Gospel Baptist Church FGB serves an urban
neighborhood in St. Louis of about 9,500 residents and larger community and is
located just northeast of Washington University in St. Louis where the Social
System Design Lab is now located. The work in the West End has been a three-way
collaboration between the Bishop George White, the Social System Design Lab,
and Laura Brennan and her team at Transtria, LLC, also based in St. Louis. The
Special Community Workgroup (SCW), the name of the core modeling team that
has been meeting regularly since September 2010, leads this work.
I fi rst met George White through an introduction by Terry Weiss. George and
Terry tell a story about how they had been eating dinner in a local restaurant and
noticing the prevalence of obesity. Terry had heard a talk that Laura had given in
St. Louis on social determinants and health and approached her afterwards to see
what could be done.
Laura and I are part of the original National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity
Research (NCCOR) Envision Comparative Modeling (CompMod) network in a
project that is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Offi ce of
Behavioral Social Science Research (HHSN276201200027C). Patty Mabry, a
champion for advancing systems science to advance population health, is the Senior
Advisor and Acting Deputy Director of OBSSR and codirector of Envision (with
Regina Bures, E unice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and
Human Development, NICHD). Patty has also been the codirector of the Institutes
on Systems Science and Health with Bobby Milstein. Patty introduced Laura and
me and encouraged us to submit a bid for a project to develop a system dynamics
model on childhood obesity. Along the way, Patty meeting with colleagues in the
Envision network provided a way to understand the value of what we were doing,
where the gaps were, and in what directions to push the social innovations further
and connected this work globally in collaboration with Steve Allender and Boyd
Swinburn at the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity
Prevention at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.
While the SCW that has guided this work over the last several years ebbed and
fl owed in membership, several members deserve special mention for the role they
have played over the years. Jenny Manuel has been with the group from the beginning
Preface vii
and attended nearly every meeting. She likes to ask questions and a champion of the
community and developing principles for collaboration. Marie Coleman, who passed
away last year, did not let us hide behind the equations and pushed us to improve the
model in ways we would have otherwise missed. Artis Porter participated in a ses-
sion, joined the SCW and several weeks later stood in front of the room as a commu-
nity facilitator opening up the session. Sylvester Idleburg brought his knowledge of
the community and gangs into the model along with an enthusiasm and outlook on life
that inspires us all. Leonard Scruggs, retired from Boeing, knows about using models,
design, and getting on with things. And of course, George White, who has not only
opened up his church and community but also quickly picked up the idea of models,
feedback, and system dynamics and brought them into the community through his
Sunday sermons, writing, and presentations including a session at the 2011 Institute
on Systems Science and Health in Pittsburg.
Ritenour High School is a large urban high school in St. Louis with approximately
2,000 students in a school district that has over the last 5 years been committed to the
vision of spreading systems thinking throughout the entire school district, from kin-
dergarten through high school. Paul Newton, a system dynamics colleague at Boeing
in Seattle, introduced me to Mary Scheetz in the fall of 2008. Mary Scheetz is well
known within the fi eld of systems thinking in schools having been introduced to sys-
tem dynamics through Gordon Brown—Jay Forrester’s teacher and mentor at MIT—
in the mid-1980s. Mary has been a passionate leader and promoter of systems thinking
in schools through her work in Tucson, the Waters Foundation, and eventually
Ritenour School District (RSD) as an assistant superintendent.
When the Social System Design Lab was founded in 2009, one of the underlying
principles was a commitment to education in system dynamics/systems thinking
across the lifespan including K-12 education and an explicit relationship with RSD.
This principle was inherently practical for the Social System Design Lab. With
scarce resources, we could invest 4 years in training a doctoral student and then see
them graduate, or we could invest 4 years in training high school students and see
them go to college, some of whom might stay in the St. Louis area and become part
of our resource pool for doing system dynamics research.
I fi rst met Tony Robinson, principal of Ritenour High School, in the spring of
2010 during the fi rst year of the Social System Design Lab, when Mary and Tony
brought 15 students from the Safe School Ambassador’s program to visit the lab and
participant in a 3-h demonstration of group model building. Timothy Hower, Krista
Chalise, and I led the students through a sequence of group model building scripts.
The causal loop diagram contained variables about getting in fi ghts, boyfriend–
girlfriend drama, teen pregnancy, tension, and school participation.
Mary tells the story of a student being in awe of the causal loop diagram of the
situation they just described, the power of that student coming up to the whiteboard
to take the marker and edit the diagram, and the impact that had on the students and
their learning of system dynamics. That was a pivotal moment when we realized we
could unobtrusively teach system dynamics using group model building. Several
weeks later in a second session at Ritenour High School, Krista asked them what
kinds of conversations they had been having about the model.
viii Preface
Cassandra explained how she had intervened with a friend, retelling us how she
has had laid out a long casual sequence of what would happen if her friend did what
she was contemplating. It did not matter whether or not the model was “right” in an
objective sense; all that mattered was that she was able to use the diagram to reason
longer than her friend to stop the behavior. At the Systems Thinking in Schools
Institute in St. Louis several months later, Ayden, one of Tony’s students, led a
group of adults through the exercises we had used in the fi rst workshop. We joked
that if we had known they would be doing that, we would have given them the
scripts, a practice that we have since adopted.
Over the years, we did more workshops including a one-day group model build-
ing workshop led by Ayden and Lorena, another of Tony’s students. Some of the
students have now graduated and gone to college in the St. Louis area, while some
of our very best students in the Social System Design Lab have decided to go into
K-12 education. Innovations that students from RHS have codeveloped are spread-
ing to other parts of St. Louis, the USA, and Canada, and the rest of the world
including India, China, Mesoamerica, and Australia.
I have learned and changed much in the course of this work and developing
CBSD and see the communities and their members as my teachers. They have taken
risks and invested in a process that did not have a name when we started. In an effort
to help sustain the work in these communities, my portion of the proceeds from this
book will be divided between FES, the West End Mount Carmel Full Gospel Baptist
Church, and Ritenour School District. Even small changes embedded in feedback
loops that accumulate can have powerful effects.
This book is for anyone interested in helping to make communities a better place
and advance social justice using system dynamics and group model building. My
hope is that the social innovation continues to improve the methods and the lives of
the people in communities around the world, giving people a new way to view situ-
ations, empower them to use the methods in their own way, and draw on the rigor
that system dynamics has to offer in thinking about feedback systems from an
endogenous perspective.
St. Louis , MO , USA Peter S. Hovmand
Acknowledgements
Work that is community based is embedded in relationships, and many have
contributed in small ways and large ideas that refl ected in this book. I always enjoy
reading the acknowledgements in books because they help me understand the rela-
tionships and context. They tell me a lot about who the person is and how the ideas
emerged.
The methods described here were developed through a variety of research proj-
ects funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Brown
School Violence and Injury Prevention Center (1R49CE001510); Center for New
Institutional Social Sciences (CNISS); National Institutes of Health, Offi ce of
Behavioral Social Science Research (HHSN276201200027C); International Center
for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES); St. Louis Federal
Reserve Bank; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; National Cancer Institute (NCI
U54CA155496); National Science Foundation (SES-0724577); and the Substance
Abuse Mental Health Services Administration Mental Health Transformation State
Incentive Grant (SM57474-01).
This work would not have been possible without leaders such as Jagdeesh Rao,
Bishop George White, and Mary Scheetz or terrifi c colleagues at Washington
University in St. Louis. A special thanks goes out to my collaborators on projects
who saw the potential and believed in the approach, including Gautam Yadama,
Monica Matthews (now at St. Louis University), Melissa Jonson-Reid, Doug Luke,
Matt Kreuter, Enola Proctor, Ross Brownson, Sarah Gehlert, Michael Sheridan,
David Gillespie, Molly Tovar, Eddie Lawlor, and Shanti Khinduka in the Brown
School; Jody O’Sullivan and Pratim Biswas in engineering; and Graham Colditz
and Ken Carson in the School of Medicine.
Nor would any of this have been possible without the patience and thoughtful
comments of Laura Brennan at Transtria, LLC, both as a scholar and a leader of an
organization. I also count myself fortunate to have the opportunity to work with
innovators such as Kurt Stange and Jim Deering who have unobtrusively taught me
the most about developing effective transdisciplinary teams.
ix
