1. System Archetypes
Sources: Jay Forrester, Donella Meadows, Peter Senge, Dan Kim, William Braun, and others.

2. Forrester’s 1968 List (Urban Dynamics, Chapter 6: Notes on Complex Systems)
Counterintuive behavior
Insensitivity to parameter changes
Resistance to policy changes
Control through influence points
Corrective programs counteracted by the system
Long-term versus short-term response
Drift to low performance

3. Dana Meadows’ 1980 List (Whole Earth Models & Systems, Coevolution Quarterly)
Policy resistance
Drift to low performance
Addiction
Official addiction – shifting the burden to the intervener
High leverage, wrong direction

4. Dana’s Recommendations for Global Policy
Respectful of the system
Responsible for the system’s behavior
Experimental
Attentive to the system as a whole
Attentive to the long term
Comprehensive
No part of the human race is really separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. We all rise or fall together.

5. Braun’s List Limits to Growth (aka Limits to Success)
Shifting the Burden
Eroding Goals
Escalation
Success to the Successful
Tragedy of the Commons
Fixes that Fail
Growth and Underinvestment
Accidental Adversaries
Attractiveness Principle

6. Limits to growth [Limits to success]

7. Shifting the burden
Examples?

8. Eroding goals
What famous model does this come from?

9. Escalation

10. Success to the successful

11. Tragedy of the commons
Not clear one can build a model exhibiting the phenomenon of the Tragedy of the Commons from this structure.

12. Fixes that fail
What are the stocks?

13. Growth and underinvestment

14. Accidental adversaries
I’ve never seen this applied.

15. Attractiveness principle

16. How Braun puts them together

17. Things to observe
Forrester’s list comes directly from simulation-based studies
Meadows’s list is similarly based on empirical experience with formal models
Braun’s list (adapted from Senge and Kim) is distant from formal models.
Some archetypes are easy to model.
Some archetypes are hard to model.

18. A stock-and-flow archetype (Andersen and Richardson, various interventions)