Systems Thinking Games

Excellent recap of a week-long systems thinking games workshop at BenthamFish's game page.

A thought: when we were kids, Jeff and I used to play Battletech. We'd build our Mechs in isolation, spending a set amount of tonnage on designing various mechs in various numbers. Then we'd fight. The Mechs are elements of the system in this case.

What if we were able observe the other person's Mechs during the design process? We would likely change our Mechs in response to what they were doing, and they would change theirs in response to what we were doing. We'd go back and forth, and may never arrive at finished Mechs. The design process, then would become the system. This is how multiple lifeforms in an ecosystem develop, and it's the reason we never arrive. We keep changing in response to the others.

And, as for the Systems Farm, it would be composed of enough subsystems that each student or pair/group of students could bite off an individual subsystem for careful study. Putting all the subsystems together, you would see how they all relied on each other. Each subsystem group could even recommend changes in the management of the subsystem to get more out of that subsystem. Putting them all together, you could see how those changes would effect, or what they would demand, from the other subsystems.

For example, one subsystem might be ducks. Inputs would include food and bedding and space and labor time. Outputs would include eggs and dirty bedding. What happens if you scale up the size of the flock to take advantage of unused space in the coop? You would get more eggs and create more dirty bedding (compost), but you would also need more feed. How does this effect the feed production? How much more land would they need and how much more time would it take? Do they have the necessary equipment? And how would this effect the vegetable fields? Do they need extra compost or do they have enough already? Maybe they, too, could scale up if they only had more compost...