Emerging Trends: The Place of System Dynamics in Organizational Change

Abstract

Abstract-In the recent past, the traditional approaches to management have increasingly been challenged due to the flux state of the world of today. In addition, organizations are incessantly faced with intricate webs of information to decipher and the attendant difficult decisions to make. These developments have resulted in the emergence of innovative methods aimed at exploring and adapting to the modern business environment. System dynamics is one of such approaches whose core is the premise that organizational situations constitute a system and should be contextualized as such. In other words, the dynamic state of an organization at any point in time is the cumulative results of past and present patterns of individual and collective perceptions and behaviours. Due to the interdependence of organizational interactions, system dynamics suggests that the efforts to change from a less acceptable organizational state to the desired one should involve an iterative approach, taking on causal loops of causes and effects.This research paper argues that system dynamics can be employed as an aid to organizational change, complementing and guiding the efforts of change managers during the planning and implementation stages. What is more, the paper holds that this approach, when effectively used in forecasting, can act as a catalyst for change.Index Terms-System dynamics, organizational change, causal loop.