ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on new approaches to modelling systems dynamics, group model building and other approaches to building systems understandings from qualitative data. It considers key ideas from complexity theory to be interdependence, nonlinearity, emergent features, and adaptive agents and open systems. The chapter describes each of the features and establish relevance for an understanding policy issues. Mental modelling, therefore, is able to engage people in understanding issues as systemic and complex, and presents a useful tool for researchers and practitioners in public policy and management that are interested in acting on wicked or complex problems. The methodological choices that researchers and practitioners in public policy in management make have a marked influence on what they are able to comprehend about the social world, the boundaries that are most evident to them, and which come to be seen as important. A range of researchers have begun, however, to develop new approaches to generating systems models from qualitative data.
