Using generic system archetypes to support thinking and modelling

This paper provides some context for my paper which won the 2004 Jay Wright Forrester award. It describes the system dynamics challenges I received from a number of people and my response to them, particularly to explore the issue of mismatch in organisations between process and boundary structure. It also describes how I have been using generic archetypes in practice since publication of the original work. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Syst. Dyn. Rev. 20, 341–356, (2004) It gives me great pleasure to accept the Jay Wright Forrester Award for 2004. I would like to thank my nominators, the Society awards committee and particularly David Andersen for his kind words in the introduction. I would also like to thank a number of people who have helped me over many years to develop the thinking that led to the award. I owe a big debt to my wife, Liz. It was Liz who in 1976 saw a small advertisement in a local paper for a Research Fellow in system dynamics at Bradford Management Centre and thought I might be interested. At that time I was working in operational research at British Coal and the idea of developing more strategic models appealed very much. Liz is an instinctive systems thinker and until recently was the lead in the Department of Health in the UK for, amongst other things, older people’s services. For many years she has been my mentor and guide through both systems thinking and health/social care in the UK. I am also grateful to many colleagues in many organisations for their stimulus and patience with my questions and ideas. In particular I would mention my friends in the System Dynamics Society, Cognitus, various academic institutions and OLM for their continued support and encouragement. In my lecture today I will focus on how I have been using the ideas of generic archetypes in practice since the award winning paper (Wolstenholme, 2003) was published and some conclusions from this work. These conclusions include the idea of describing the problem of implementing systemic thinking itself in archetypal form. To support the application description, I will summarise the paper and explain the importance of organisational boundaries in system archetypes. I will also outline the challenges that led to the research and will, in turn, suggest one or two of my own research challenges for the future. Professor Eric