Product Description

Systems thinking can help you tame the complexity of real world problems by providing a structured way of balancing a broad, overall view with the selection of the right level of detail, truly allowing you to "see the forest for the trees". Only by taking a broad view can we avoid the twin dangers of a silo mentality - in which a fix "here" simply shifts the problem to "there" - and organisational myopia - in which a fix "now" gives rise to a much bigger problem to fix "then".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16557 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

About the Author
Dennis Sherwood was for twelve years a consulting partner with Coopers & Lybrand and was subsequently an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs in London, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and Vice President of SRI Consulting. Educated at the universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and a Sloan Fellow, with Distinction, of the London Business School, he is now the Managing Director of Organica Consulting which specialised in building competitive advantage through innovation whose clients include Thames Water, Nestle, National Grid, Pearson TV, The Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, Wedgewood, and Yorkshire Electricity. He is a is well-known on the conference circuit and is the author of five previous books including Smart Things to Know About Innovation and Unlock Your Mind. Visit www.organicaconsulting.com for more information.

Customer Reviews

An excellent book for learning about system dynamics
If you want to learn how to draw causal loop diagrams and use them in your work, this is the book for you.

The book is extremely comprehensive, yet easy to read and written in a style that makes you feel like the author is personally teaching you about system dynamics in a one-to-one lesson.

If you are brand new to systems dynamics, this book will take you from your first steps right up to feeling confident in drawing causal loop diagrams, and even set you on the road to using modelling software to simulate your diagrams.

If you are already familiar with systems dynamics but want to work on your causal loop diagramming skills, this book is also ideal. It works through example after example, all drawn from the real world, with some very topical examples for the UK (e.g. the railways system).

The book is simultaneously simple and profound. I read it in just a few days, and enjoyed the experience as well as learned a lot from it.

All in all, I would say that this is the best book on the market for learning about causal loops and system dynamics.

Packed with Knowledge!
This is an extraordinary, in the sense of out-of-the-ordinary, book. Flipping through it, you see page after page of loops and curves. At first, you might think it is a guide to drawing. And in a sense, it is. Most of the book explains how to use depictions of various types of loops to represent different kinds of business problems. Such problems never occur in isolation, because every business is a system, and everything that happens in a business has causes and effects that reach into other areas of the business and into the outside world. Author Dennis Sherwood is not peddling a simple notion, but rather is explaining “systems thinking,” a method of analyzing systems and processes. We unexpectedly found this quite entertaining, written with a light touch and bound to give almost any manager some new, valuable insights. On the down side, the author probably could have delivered his core message more succinctly, and after a while his insistence on demonstrating and categorizing the species and genera of loops begins to seem, well, a bit loopy.

An excellent guide to Systems Thinking
Dennis distills the challenge of understanding systems thinking and causal loop diagramming into the basics in a highly easy to access way. This is an excellent introduction for the beginner as well as a thought provoking inspiration for anyone using CLDs and needing to explain their use to a audience unused to them.