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Accidental Adversaries
Accidental Adversaries is one of the ten system archetypes used in system dynamics modelling, or systems thinking. This archetype describes the degenerative pattern that develops when two subjects cooperating for a common goal, accidentally take actions that undermine each other's success. It is similar to the escalation system archetype in terms of pattern behaviour that develops over time.Senge, P. et al. (1994). The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. New York: Doubleday Currency. Archetype description The archetype describes a pattern where two subjects have decided to work together because they will benefit from the alliance.Braun B. (2002The System Archetypes/ref> Each take actions believing that it will bring benefit to the other and if the cooperation works, they will both benefit from it. Problems start arising when one or both of the subjects need to fix a local gap in performance, maybe due to external pressure. They initiate action to fix the gap and accidentally undermine each ...
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System Archetype
System archetypes are patterns of behavior of a system. Systems expressed by circles of causality have therefore similar structure. Identifying a system archetype and finding the leverage enables efficient changes in a system. The basic system archetypes and possible solutions of the problems are mentioned in the section '' Examples of system archetypes''. A fundamental property of nature is that no cause can affect the past. System archetypes do not imply that current causes affect past effects. Circles of causality The basic idea of system thinking is that every action triggers a reaction. In system dynamics this reaction is called feedback. There are two types of feedback – reinforcing feedback and balancing feedback. Sometimes a feedback (or a reaction) does not occur immediately – the process contains delays. Any system can be drawn as a diagram set up with circles of causality – including actions, feedbacks and delays. Reinforcing feedback (+) Reinforcing fe ...
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Stock And Flow
Economics, business, accounting, and related fields often distinguish between quantities that are stocks and those that are flows. These differ in their units of measurement. A ''stock'' is measured at one specific time, and represents a quantity existing at that point in time (say, December 31, 2004), which may have accumulated in the past. A ''flow'' variable is measured over an interval of time. Therefore, a flow would be measured ''per unit of time'' (say a year). Flow is roughly analogous to rate or speed in this sense. For example, U.S. nominal gross domestic product refers to a total number of dollars spent over a time period, such as a year. Therefore, it is a flow variable, and has units of dollars/year. In contrast, the U.S. nominal capital stock is the total value, in dollars, of equipment, buildings, and other real productive assets in the U.S. economy, and has units of dollars. The diagram provides an intuitive illustration of how the ''stock'' of capital currently a ...
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Walmart
Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas. The company was founded by Sam Walton in nearby Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and incorporated under Delaware General Corporation Law on October 31, 1969. It also owns and operates Sam's Club retail warehouses. Walmart has 10,586 stores and clubs in 24 countries, operating under 46 different names. The company operates under the name Walmart in the United States and Canada, as Walmart de México y Centroamérica in Mexico and Central America, and as Flipkart, Flipkart Wholesale in India. It has wholly owned operations in Chile, Canada, and South Africa. Since August 2018, Walmart held only a minority stake in Walmart Brasil, which was renamed Grupo Big in August 2019, with 20 percent of the company's shar ...
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Procter & Gamble
The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) is an American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. It specializes in a wide range of personal health/consumer health, personal care and hygiene products; these products are organized into several segments including beauty; grooming; health care; fabric & home care; and baby, feminine, & family care. Before the sale of Pringles to Kellogg's, its product portfolio also included food, snacks, and beverages. P&G is incorporated in Ohio. In 2014, P&G recorded $83.1 billion in sales. On August 1, 2014, P&G announced it was streamlining the company, dropping and selling off around 100 brands from its product portfolio in order to focus on the remaining 65 brands, which produced 95% of the company's profits. A.G. Lafley, the company's chairman and CEO until October 2015, said the future P&G would be "a much simpler, much less complex company of ...
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Mental Model
A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about their own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behaviour and set an approach to solving problems (similar to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks. A mental model is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. Kenneth Craik suggested in 1943 that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Jay Wright Forrester defined general mental models as: The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the r ...
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Accidental Adversaries TimeBehaviour
Accidental may refer to: * Accidental (music), a symbol which changes the pitch of a note * ''Accidental'' (album), by Fred Frith * Accidental (biology), a biological phenomenon more commonly known as vagrancy * ''The Accidental'', a 2005 novel by Ali Smith * The Accidental (band), a UK folk band * Accidental property, a philosophical term See also * Accidence (or inflection), a modification of a word to express different grammatical categories * Accident (other) * Adventitious, which is closely related to "accidental" as used in philosophy and in biology * Random In common usage, randomness is the apparent or actual lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps often has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual rando ...
, which often is used incorrectly where ''accidental'' or ''adventitious'' would be appropriate {{disambiguation ...
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Negative Feedback
Negative feedback (or balancing feedback) occurs when some function of the output of a system, process, or mechanism is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances. Whereas positive feedback tends to lead to instability via exponential growth, oscillation or chaotic behavior, negative feedback generally promotes stability. Negative feedback tends to promote a settling to equilibrium, and reduces the effects of perturbations. Negative feedback loops in which just the right amount of correction is applied with optimum timing can be very stable, accurate, and responsive. Negative feedback is widely used in mechanical and electronic engineering, and also within living organisms, and can be seen in many other fields from chemistry and economics to physical systems such as the climate. General negative feedback systems are studied in control systems engineering. Negative feedback l ...
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System Dynamics
System dynamics (SD) is an approach to understanding the nonlinear behaviour of complex systems over time using stocks, flows, internal feedback loops, table functions and time delays. Overview System dynamics is a methodology and mathematical modeling technique to frame, understand, and discuss complex issues and problems. Originally developed in the 1950s to help corporate managers improve their understanding of industrial processes, SD is currently being used throughout the public and private sector for policy analysis and design. Convenient graphical user interface (GUI) system dynamics software developed into user friendly versions by the 1990s and have been applied to diverse systems. SD models solve the problem of simultaneity (mutual causation) by updating all variables in small time increments with positive and negative feedbacks and time delays structuring the interactions and control. The best known SD model is probably the 1972 '' The Limits to Growth''. This mod ...
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Positive Feedback
Positive feedback (exacerbating feedback, self-reinforcing feedback) is a process that occurs in a feedback loop which exacerbates the effects of a small disturbance. That is, the effects of a perturbation on a system include an increase in the magnitude of the perturbation. That is, ''A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A''.Keesing, R.M. (1981). Cultural anthropology: A contemporary perspective (2nd ed.) p.149. Sydney: Holt, Rinehard & Winston, Inc. In contrast, a system in which the results of a change act to reduce or counteract it has negative feedback. Both concepts play an important role in science and engineering, including biology, chemistry, and cybernetics. Mathematically, positive feedback is defined as a positive loop gain around a closed loop of cause and effect. That is, positive feedback is in phase with the input, in the sense that it adds to make the input larger. Positive feedback tends to cause system instability. When the loop gain is p ...
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