George P. Richardson

Some of the greatest developments in our field contain Mixed Blessings: positives and negatives, good stuff and bad stuff, brilliant aspects and actual flaws. In this paper I will call them ‘Blessings’ and ‘Bugs’. The Blessings help us do our strongest work, increase our skills, develop our insights, and expand our reach. But sometimes Blessings can turn into Bugs. They can get in our way by appearing to be indispensable, by insisting on being used, by substituting seductive simplicity for necessary deep thinking, by distracting us away from what really is going on, by cluttering our reports when they do not apply, by confusing our audiences when something else would work better. And when they are actually, subtly, wrong. This note offers reflections on the Blessings and Bugs in system dynamics practice as I have seen them, with the goal of strengthening and sharpening our field.

We usually hope that social norms discourage injustice. However, we are all witnesses to harmful norms enforced by governments, such as xenophobia, which need to be contested and changed. Previous studies have concluded that it is possible to change a harmful norm through contestation by powerless actors if suitable structural conditions exist. However, these structural conditions have not been sufficiently studied and, as such, are the focus of this paper. Our paper begins with a review of well-established micro-level theories of social identity theory (SIT), recast as a set of 42 discrete theoretical statements. These statements are then re-expressed in the form of a systems-level theory of macro-changes in societal norms using the system dynamics approach. The over-time dynamic behavior simulated using this structure is compared to events in two well-known case studies of changes in societal norms: women’s suffrage between 1830 and 1920, and the emergence of more tolerant lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) norms in the US between 1950 and 2018. Further simulations of the model explore the roles of anger and social outrage, foreshadowing the ability of simulation-based experiments, such as the one presented here, to explore in a robust way a wide range of (undemocratic) regimes under counter-factual conditions.

The 20th century saw at least five regions of the world that gave themselves over to unspeakably evil regimes, each resulting in totalitarian dictatorships responsible for horrific suffering and deaths of millions of people. As part of a group of authors involved in various ways in the study of civil society and the common good, this author was invited to address what systems thinking could contribute to understandings of the emergence of such extensive evil. This article develops a qualitative model crafted to capture the generic structure and dynamics of the emergence of extensive evil in a society. Focusing on crucial stocks and flows and feedback loops, the map reveals eight areas where a healthy society may be vulnerable to the spread of such evil, with corresponding areas of resistance pushing back on its apparent inevitability. The paper concludes with reflections on values in systems thinking.