For years, Climate Interactive’s World Climate exercise has been used in classrooms and conferences around the world to help students and professionals better understand the challenges facing international climate change negotiations. Our friends at MIT have documented a recent exercise that beautifully captures the experience: Led in this instance by MIT professor and Climate Interactive […]
Archives for August 2013
What is an Elephant? 5 Ways Systems Thinking Helps Action on Climate
Cross-posted from Climate Access. Where do you spend your time working on climate change amid the many stakeholders, complex biogeochemical processes, and thousands of laws, rules, and incentives? With limited resources, it can be challenging to know where to focus your efforts. Techniques and approaches for understanding and addressing the complex challenges we come up […]
John Sterman and the Dalai Lama: Investigating Growth with a Piece of Paper
Here’s a fun game you can play to get acquainted with systems thinking: Take a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Now fold it in half again. Keep going until you’ve folded it six times. At this point, you’ve already managed one more fold than the Dalai Lama when Climate Interactive team member […]
Robert Knisely: We Need More System Dynamics in Government
“Genius has been defined as the ability to come to correct conclusions on insufficient information.” -Robert Knisely In his latest blog entry for Governing, former Clinton administration official Robert Knisely offered some sage advice for policymakers: read up on your System Dynamics! Given that System Dynamics (SD) is the modeling approach that underlies our work […]
Rewards and Lessons From A Day of Systems Thinking with the Dalai Lama Fellows
“That’s another way we can ensure that traditional skills are passed on!” “If we modify the program we can include that whole group of kids we were forgetting!” “Should I invite the funders to come to the village from the start? Even if it’s not perfect they could see where they could help.” Exclamations like […]
Innovate Podcast Features Climate Interactive, Impact of Systems Thinking
“Not only are problems interconnected, but often solutions are interconnected as well.” -Beth Sawin In the latest edition of the bi-monthly Innovate Podcast, which features interviews with influential social entrepreneurs and transformative thinkers, host David Castro sat down with Climate Interactive co-director Beth Sawin to talk climate change and sustainability. Tackling climate change can be intimidating. […]