ABSTRACT
For a system dynamicist, a 21st century challenge is to make sense of the accelerating changes in technology, population, economics, and environment. Changes in these domains may enhance our lives, or on the other hand may threaten our survival. To our dismay, most of the changes that confront us as challenges are the consequences of humans’ past actions. Our ability to learn from the past and to project change needs our focused attention to avoid a tipping point that may carry us beyond our capacity to recover; this is a role for System Dynamics and synthetic worlds. Through the use of synthetic worlds, system dynamics methodologies and tools will facilitate our learning process, demonstrate potential benefits of policy change, i.e., a decision-making rule (Forrester 1961), and highlight their intended and unintended consequences for professional and public scrutiny to avoid disastrous tipping points.
