Subject: School Change and Battery Metaphor

Posted by Barun K. Pani on 2/3/2014
In Reply To:School Change and Battery Metaphor Posted by Tim Joy on 2/1/2014

Message:

Tim,

Long back in my student life in seventies (Iran Oil Crisis), I followed JW Forrester's System dynamics modelling techniques in a automobile industry foundry to manage oil consumption. I found more realistic results when we modelled individual oil charged forging machines separately and then integrating the whole model, instead of a team. SD provides this power by attaching small variations to individuals instead of averaging the effect by summation. For example, identifying and shutting down forging machines with lower efficiency and making sure availability of shift workers is healthy for higher efficiency machines made better utilization of oil. This was a purely engineering set up, but what I discovered was that SD has the power to incorporate multiple individuals and find the team behavior.

The battery metaphor came to my mind because of the charging and discharging cycle of battery mimics learning (and forgetting ) cycles. I find it fascinating how similar they are. Just wanted to bring it to the discussion table. It may the bias I have because of my electrical engineering background.

Thanks for all the discussions.