Subject: Love truth and peace

Posted by Jeff Potash on 11/30/2005
In Reply To:Love truth and peace Posted by Melinda Salazar on 11/20/2005

Message:

Melinda, Jeff (Levin), and others actively engaged in the “truth creates peace in the world” conversation:

This is really a great opportunity for all of us to think about how and where the tools of systems thinking and dynamic modeling might generate some helpful insights. I’ll take a first step, specifically responding to Melinda’s challenge, by trying to surface some “better questions.” My hope is to inspire others to join in a neat collaborative “learning community”
exercise to ponder how we might best move ahead….

Here goes:

In the simplest of all scenarios, we might think about using a reinforcing causal loop, containing two elements – “truth” and “peace,” to illustrate Jeff’s daughter’s mental model.

We can, then, generate two possible “storylines”: the first, which I suspect reflects Jeff’s daughter’s “mental model,” suggests (1) that if we start by being more truthful, it will cultivate peace, and others will be inspired in ever increasing numbers to follow our lead. We need to bear in mind, though, for this loop to be valid, it may also function as a very different, second storyline, as a “vicious” as opposed to “virtuous”
cycle: evidence of “untruth” may trigger conflict and lead to an ever accelerating decline in both truthfulness and peace.

How might we assess either behavior? Presumably, we have some knowledge where one or both of these behaviors have occurred. Presumably, each has some reached some “limit?” Perhaps an interesting consideration might be to contemplate where, when, and why these limits have emerged. Perhaps that will help us to structure a more complete understanding of the “system” of interest.

That leads me to some “better” questions:

(1) Does this causal loop fully capture “the system” of interest to us?
For instance, does truth always lead to peace? Or is there some intermediary element as, for instance, “willingness for compromise” (or, in systems terms, “making trade-offs?) that converts truth to peace?

(2) Assuming you need at least two parties to achieve peace, perhaps we should be thinking about how “A’s” truthfulness inspires “B” to be truthful and how the combination generates peace (this begins to look like the classic “escalation” or “arms-race” archetype). Does that model provide any insight into limiting factors in this system?

(3) Another thought comes to my mind as an historian familiar with the oscillatory nature of war and peace: once we have identified one or more relevant balancing elements, how might we adapt our mental model to generate oscillatory behavior? What would we need to add at that point to the existing causal loop(s)?

I fear I could ramble on at far greater length. My point, though, is to suggest that we have what I believe is a “mental model” of a desired behavior, and a starting ‘systemic” structure (in “truth” and “peace”) to begin to operationalize a systemic model for better managing toward that desired goal.

What more, in terms of structure, might we need in order to convince ourselves that we’ve captured the key relationships in the system such that we can begin to convince others of the wisdom of this insight?

Jeff

P. Jeffrey Potash, Ph.D.
Partner, Center For Interdisciplinary Excellence in System Dynamics,LLP Suite 185; 1 Mill Street Burlington, VT 05401

Follow Ups:

Love truth and peace - Christian Abarca 12/4/2005