antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 4:21 am on April 24, 2020

Think structurally about ‘effects’ from COVID-19

Three systemic points (but at the ‘technical’ not ‘adaptive’ level):

We’ve had the earthquake, now comes the tsunami, then the aftershock waves… we shouldn’t expect the effects to be in
Second and n order effects – re working from home – implications on business and real estate, and emergency preparedness and stockpiling for the future etc..
And we should expect interesting oscillation via the Bullwhip effect – Wikipedia

…the managers at GE were perplexed because employment at their appliance plants in Kentucky exhibited a significant three-year cycle. …Forrester was able to show how the instability in GE employment was due to the internal structure of the firm.https://t.co/q0snywfX6V

— Mel Conway (@conways_law) October 22, 2019

JVS 2:08 pm on April 24, 2020

Bullwhip, in the linked article, focuses on changes in demand. There is, and will be, some of that to reconcile.

But, what happens when the system in general wasn’t really demand driven, but driven by demand that was an artifact of a supply side driven process, that created artificial demand. Negative prices for oil? Pushing on a bullwhip?

Using models and economic forecasts that assume demand driven, in a world that is largely managed by suppliers pushing markets through advertising (once you get past basic, functional,consumer goods), may not only be wrong, they not only might be useless, they could be counter-productive.

The primary big ticket demand isn’t really even consumer driven, is it? Social welfare is a demand that goes unsatisfied, while military spending is not a consumer driven function. Money for bullets is always there. Money for people’s health? It’s an upside down world.

My understanding is that the magnetic poles were reversed in the past. Is it possible that there may yet be other poles which may possibly be headed for reversal to right a world that has received a blind-side hit?

Feedback loops only work and are the model when feedback is actually part of the process. I’m not so sure the wizards of finance have been looking for feedback in the right places. Checking yesterdays sales of soybeans results isn’t going to help in forecasting needs for nurses.

Joseph, in the Bible, was a better economic planner than most economists of today. 7 years of plenty, stocked up for 7 years of famine. Never time to do it right, always time to do it over is a refrain I’ve heard for 50 years now. We’re running out of time.
systemsthinkingrebellion 6:10 am on April 28, 2020
Seeing all this keeps bringing me back to Meadows’ ‘leverage points’, and then thinking about…

The incalculable array of dynamics playing out at the same time – reinforcing or balancing one another in ways that we cannot yet see.
- People wondering if this is a paradigm change…
- People thinking this ‘is’ a paradigm change and wanting the old one back…
- People thinking this ‘is’ a paradigm change and being happy with that because they believe that they know what the next one looks like(!)…
… the bullwhip reference made me think too – Lots of media commentary drawing comparisons with 1918, but I wonder… the world is interconnected now on a level that was unimaginable then, and the interconnections have increased the complexity and interdependence, and theoretically the significance of the bullwhip (though at the same time information feedback is vastly superior now).

I strongly suspect that there isn’t a useful prior reference point for this situation – no matter how hard we try, we’re probably going to be stuck in Senge’s ‘snapshots of isolated parts of the system’. Everything we do (or choose not to do) will have second and n order effects and our ability to collectively ‘see’ them will be severely limited.

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Think structurally about ‘effects’ from COVID-19