I think it's fair to say that System Dynamics has two major strands of thinking. One grows out of the original Forrester style -- managerialist, looking for har

I think it's fair to say that System Dynamics has two major strands of thinking. One grows out of the original Forrester style -- managerialist, looking for hard numbers, wanting to solve hard problems. I count Sterman in this strand; he has himself lamented that SD as a field has not kept up with developments in other fields it could adopt[1]. The second strand is more woo-ey. Meadows falls into that category. It's fun, but I don't use SD as a thinking harness because I want to be one with anything or achieve Satori. I use it because I am too stupid to solve systems of differential and integral equations merely by squinting at things. I quite like DES as a style too. It's tremendously more efficient and easier to debug. I sorta-kinda smooshed them together in a simulator I built[0]. [0] https://github.com/pivotal/skenario https://github.com/pivotal/skenario [1] "System Dynamics at Sixty" in System Dynamics Review Jan-June 2018. There are some PDFs around: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15699150741004493229&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15699150741004493...