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Teaching strategic thinking using system dynamics: lessons from a strategic development course
Author(s) -
Kunc Martin
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
system dynamics review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.491
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1099-1727
pISSN - 0883-7066
DOI - 10.1002/sdr.471
Subject(s) - strategic thinking , dynamics (music) , systems thinking , system dynamics , diversity (politics) , mathematics education , computer science , key (lock) , knowledge management , process management , strategic planning , management science , psychology , pedagogy , management , engineering , sociology , artificial intelligence , computer security , anthropology , economics
The use of System Dynamics within strategy courses aims to teach students dynamic theories to explain firm performance. This paper presents an analysis of the development of students' strategic systems thinking skills after taking a course on strategic development processes. Students that achieved the best performance employed graphs representing the performance of key variables, described how the strategy worked using verbal explanations of feedback processes, and validated the results obtained to detect poor or unreasonable strategies. However, a large group of students did not follow System Dynamics practices and performed poorly in their strategies. We extract two lessons: more emphasis on the areas shown by the best students, which are along the modeling for learning practices, are needed to improve students' strategic systems thinking skills, and it is important to adopt multidimensional tools to evaluate systems thinking skills given the diversity in learning preferences. Copyright © 2012 System Dynamics Society.