Bathtub dynamics: initial results of a systems thinking inventory

By L. Sweeney, John D. Sterman. 2000

777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a world of accelerating change, educators, business leaders, environmentalists and scholars are calling for the development of systems thinking to improve our ability to take effective actions. Through courses in the K-12 grades, universities, business schools, and corporations, advocates seek to teach people to think systemically. These courses range from one-day workshops with no mathematics to graduate level courses stressing formal modeling. But how do people learn to think systemically? What skills are required? Does a particular type of academic background improve one’s ability to think systemically? What systems concepts are most readily understood? Which tend to be most difficult to grasp? We describe initial results from an assessment tool or systems thinking inventory. The inventory consists of brief tasks designed to assess particular systems thinking concepts such as feedback, delays, and stocks and flows. Initial findings indicate that subjects from an elite business school with essentially no prior exposure to system dynamics concepts have a poor level of understanding of stock and flow relationships and time delays. Performance did not vary systematically with prior education, age, national origin, or other demographic variables. We hope the inventory will eventually provide a means for testing the effectiveness of training and decision aids used to improve systems thinking skills. We discuss the implications of these initial results and explore steps for future research. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Computational Theory and Mathematics, Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed5587f294a3e89a56a5facdfe4e4fa3c475c6e6

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Citations in the corpus

What constitutes systems thinking: A proposed taxonomy (2007, background): “Recognizes/seeks to understand interconnections and feedback (Ossimitz, 2000; Potash and Heinbokel, 1997; Richmond, 1997; Sweeney and Sterman, 2000) 3.”
Bodies of Knowledge for Research in Behavioral Operations (2009, background): “Booth Sweeney and Sterman (2000) and Sterman and Booth Sweeney (2002) show that people fail to predict the dynamics of simple accumulations, characterized by a single stock, one inﬂow and one outﬂow (like a bathtub with water ﬂowing in from the tap and out through the drain).”
System Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World (2002, background): “In this and related stock-flow problems, many people drew trajectories that violated basic laws of physics such as conservation of matter; for example, less than half showed the water rising when the inflow exceeds the outflow (for the solution and other examples see Booth Sweeney and Sterman (2000)”
A definition of systems thinking: A systems approach (2015, background): “Overall, this definition is extremely useful, as it lists actual skills agreed upon by many advocates of systems thinking 15 (Sweeney & Sterman, 2000).”
Development of system thinking skills in the context of earth system education (2005, background): “Other researchers (Booth Sweeny, 2000; Draper, 1993, Frank, 2000; Ossimitz, 2000) suggested that specific system thinking skills include cognitive abilities such as (a) thinking in terms of dynamic processes (delays, feedback loops, oscillations); (b) understanding how the behavior of the system ari”
A Complete Set of Systems Thinking Skills (2017, background): “However, understanding dynamic behavior is a key systems thinking skill (Stave & Hopper, 2007; Sweeney & Sterman, 2000).”
Why don't well-educated adults understand accumulation? A challenge to researchers, educators, and citizens (2009, methodology): “Although the results of prior work suggest that poor performance arises from the use of the correlation heuristic (Cronin & Gonzalez, in press; Sterman & Booth Sweeney, 2002; Booth Sweeney & Sterman, 2000), there are many other explanations.”
Understanding public complacency about climate change: adults’ mental models of climate change violate conservation of matter (2007, neutral): “…in general, including principles of mass and energy balance.2 Prior work shows people have difficulty relating the flows into and out of a stock to the trajectory of the stock, even in simple situations such as filling a bathtub or managing a firm’s inventory (Booth Sweeney and Sterman, 2000).”
Misperceptions of global climate change: information policies (2009, background): “A careful investigation of these graphs reveal that for any reasonable Brehmer 1992; Paich and Sterman 1993; Diehl and Sterman 1995; Sweeney and Sterman 2000; Kainz and Ossimitz 2002; Ossimitz 2002).”