Cows, agency, and the significance of operational thinking

Olaya, Camilo

doi:10.1002/sdr.1547

Cited by 39 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 116 publications

(131 reference statements)

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“…The above perception-to-policy process leads to the creation of social systems artifacts. Addition of these fundamental elements of social change to collapse models would allow the collapse modeling tradition to include operational thinking as discussed in Olaya (2015), and, thus, it would make that whole tradition useful for better understanding the wide variety of means by which humans have faced these challenges throughout history.…”

Section: Section 5: Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus they provide excellent representations of historical information with no capacity to see the unfolding decision rules that governed the behavioral dynamics. In other words, there is no dynamic agency in the modeling structure (Olaya 2015). Consequently, these models can potentially be read as stories of deterministic processes instead of documentation of the complexity of consciously self-organizing human-ecological relationships.…”

Section: Section 3: Background On Traditional Modeling Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Section 4B: Population growth and evolutionary self-organization of institutions. For better or worse, human societies always consciously self-organize (Turner 2003;Chase-Dunn 2016), and a model that runs without the possibility for change of this type, through operational innovation, deflates the structures of human agency that are an underlying principle of societal dynamics over time (Olaya 2015).…”

Section: Section 4: Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…systems means to think in terms of actual decision-making processes continuously carried out by free actors. From this perspective, the performance of a social system is recognized as the result of human action" (Olaya 2015). Traditionally the problem of overshoot and collapse of human cultures has been modeled from either an economic or ecological perspective that does not include human decision-making in its conceptualization of system structure, and this makes the traditional understanding less useful for social system engineering purposes, which requires better understanding of the inherent uncertainties in the design and maintenance of social systems, including the efficiency of their decision-making processes (Bulleit 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding Evolutionary Societal Decision‐making for Sustainable Social Systems Engineering Purposes

Polojärvi

Gambardella²,

Hayward

2020

INCOSE International Symp

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To engineer sustainable social systems for Earth's future, we need to understand how they change over time based on human decision‐making. The problem of the rise and fall (or overshoot and collapse) of cultures has been studied in the social sciences for centuries, so it is a useful pattern for this purpose. To understand this behavior pattern from an operational, social systems engineering perspective, this paper reviews two of the main simulation modeling approaches to this problem and finds them to be limited (from an operational perspective) by a basis in non‐human population dynamics that leads to a problematic dependence on initial conditions. We build upon this previous work, adapting it to include decision‐making and show how these decision‐making processes change the behavior over time. To demonstrate our process, we start with a recent model of Easter Island's collapse and add operational structures that allow human decision‐making to enter the modeling structure. We show how the addition of operational decision‐making structures provides a better fit to the anthropological data and how these structures were used to generate policy on the island of Tikopia. Finally, we argue that these decision‐making structures are, themselves, engineered objects that can be improved through better understanding of their evolutionary nature.

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Section: Section 5: Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Section 3: Background On Traditional Modeling Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Section 4: Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding Evolutionary Societal Decision‐making for Sustainable Social Systems Engineering Purposes

Polojärvi

Gambardella²,

Hayward

2020

INCOSE International Symp

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“…According to Olaya (2012) and Sterman(2000), unlike many mechanistic systems or physical modelling, SD is based on the principle of operational thinking with a feedback mechanism of information-decision-action and influence on the environment. This feedback mechanism offers the dynamic hypotheses with unique explanatory power to diagnose the problems and visualise the behaviour of the system under different scenarios.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

System Dynamics Approach to Mitigating Skilled Labour Shortages in the Construction Industry: A South Africa Context

Aiyetan

Dillip

2018

CEB

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Skilled labour shortage in construction industry is a major challenge in South Africa. Therefore, the objective of the study is to assess the factors that cause skilled labour shortage, its consequent effects on the construction industries and how the scenario can be improved. The study was conducted by considering construction industry in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and using a survey research method and conceptual System Dynamics (SD) modelling. Findings reveals that investment, wage challenges, talent management, work environment, training, experience, and Government policy are the important challenges for the skilled labour shortage. Inadequacy of skilled labour considerably impacts the quality of work, productivity, and scheduling. The causal loop diagrams show that enhancement in investment in the labour wages will strengthen the availability of skilled labourers leading to higher productivity, and vice versa. Talent management based on appropriate recruitment and retention policy, staff development programmes and investment in these aspects will augment the skilled labour pool. Also, a better work environment through a policy of health and safety, investment in working condition and supported by Government policy will reduce the attrition of the labourer because of job dissatisfaction, which consequently will reduce the skilled labour shortage in the industry.

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