Christoph Mandl

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Institute of Production and Logistics

Diffusion of innovations denotes the spread of innovations, through market or nonmarket channels, from first implementation anywhere in the world to other countries and regions and to other markets and firms. Frank Bass published a model to explain the diffusion of innovations curve, the then-named Bass diffusion model. Though the Bass model can ex...

Arms races, predatory pricing, and conflicts occur if what A does depends upon what B does, and what B does depends upon what A does. Such a vicious cycle is the defining element of the escalation systems archetype. Escalation leads to exponential runaway. The question is whether such a system could settle. Is mutual deterrence a way to reach dynam...

What happens in a market when buyers expect a certain product quality only to find out after the purchase that the sellers misinformed them? This question is first addressed in the context of used cars. However, this dynamic is not confined to the used car market but may emerge in any market with asymmetrical information. The most disastrous exampl...

Tragedy of the commons has leverage points that are effective if and only if all stakeholders obey them. Yet this creates a profound dilemma for all stakeholders because those who do not act according to the leverage points are temporarily rewarded. A department that continues to use more and more support from the IT department while other departme...

Epidemics always evolve with the same pattern. The first infections start undetected, then infections grow exponentially, then the exponential growth slows down eventually reaching a peak and after the peak the pattern of shrinking is mirroring the pattern of growth. Epidemics are presumably as old as civilization. The oldest documented one is the...

The systems archetype “deterministic chaos” also known as logistic map may be found in many contexts in the biological, economic, and social sciences, even in entirely different fields of application. Understanding this structure and its leverage points in the context of locust plagues, one can then use this knowledge in the context of price dynami...

The most common mistake in perceiving structures is to disregard causal loops. We are trained to search for the cause of an event. When finding the ultimate cause, we are content. While perceiving events and patterns is daily routine in social systems, perceiving causal loops is unorthodox, comes slowly, and requires practice and experience. Causal...

Thomas Schelling’s Micromotives and Macrobehavior created a new field dealing with the phenomenon of emergence in social systems. As described in Chap. 3, emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties its elements do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the elements interact in a wider whole. Schellin...

The first publication addressing such generic dynamics termed this systems archetype “eroding goals” – a dynamics people experience in the context of projects. It then became clear that the same SFD describes the well-known “invisible hand.” Yet nature invented the concept of invisible hand about 252 million years earlier with the evolution of mamm...

Addressing decision-making in dynamic social systems requires departing from the paradigm of Taylorism into new territory. Yet there is also a gap between different schools of thought about dynamics of social systems. The notion of leverage points is somewhat disconnected from computer models of social systems. Stock and flows are treated separatel...

The rise and decline of Myspace is a perfect example of the limits to growth archetype. Myspace was a social networking site created in 2003. In summer of 2006, Myspace was the most visited site in the United States. By the end of 2008, Myspace reached its peak. Starting in spring of the following year, Myspace rapidly lost users. What happens when...

Addiction is a disorder characterized by a persistent and intense urge to engage in certain behaviors, despite negative consequences. Typically, such a disorder is associated with an individual. Yet, also social systems may show addictive behavior. It is not difficult to stumble into a Shifting the Burden dynamics. Getting rid of such addictive beh...

Natural language, or ordinary language, is any system of communication that has evolved in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Its purpose typically is that we can interact in more sophisticated ways than, say, wolves when hunting or bees when collecting nectar or fish when schooling. Natural languages are...

Start-ups are confronted with a particularly wicked issue: when and by how much to build up production or service capacity. In its early stage, the priority of a start-up is customer and product development. Without a concrete product and a concrete customer, it’s risky to divert scarce financial and management resources to build up capacity. Yet,...

There is no silver bullet for changing behavior of social systems. Yet in addition to everything presented in previous chapters, there are some qualities and concepts that may be necessary in making governance and managing a more successful endeavor. Our capacity to learn and to adapt is well adjusted to linear and quadratic change but social syste...

Stocks and their in- and outflows are causally related. However, stocks and their flows often are treated as if they are the same and as if the behavior of a stock matches the pattern of its flows. This cognitive bias is called stock–flow failure. Poor understanding of accumulation seems to be its prime cause. Stock–flow failure has become pervasiv...

Start-ups are particularly prone to existential crises. Between 40 and 90% of them fail within the first 3 years. One of the reasons is the breakdown of cooperation among founders. The peculiarity of start-ups, particularly high-tech start-ups, is that they are rarely founded by one person alone. These companies require so much knowledge that it is...

Why do some problems persist in spite of continuous efforts to solve them? Donella Meadows named this phenomenon policy resistance. Peter Senge then called it fixes that fail. However, because policy resistance is so pervasive the same phenomenon was and is studied in far apart domains like traffic, energy, finance, and others. Therefore, this syst...

From virology, it is well known that there exist many more types of viruses than actually infect people and cause diseases. The same holds for structures of social systems. A rather small number of relatively simple structures appear repeatedly in different businesses, professions, and real-life settings. Such system structures that produce pattern...

Prediction has become an integral part of management. Managerial decisions cannot be done without them. Any investment decision of relevance requires forecasting of crucial parameters, like interest rates and demand. Any spending on research and development requires an estimate of future needs. Or so it is believed. Yet all scientific evidence poin...

Even though “system” is an extremely broad concept covering all kinds of systems from physical to social, they share some characteristics. No matter what system, it can be in equilibrium or disequilibrium. It can be resilient or unstable, and it may show emergence or not. These are differences that make a difference. Ignoring emergence in social sy...

What makes management effective? How might a social system be successfully guided or controlled? These questions are as old as the concept of management itself. One of the more influential ideas was and still is “management by objectives”. However, setting a goal does not bring it into reality by itself. History is full of objectives by governments...

Why do policies and strategies often fail, and what can be done about it? How can complexity be managed when it cannot be reduced? From organizational addiction to market failure, from limits to growth to the rebound effect, from tragedy of the commons to path dependence, answers are anything but trivial, and can only be found by combining insights...

Weil Langzeitprognosen unmöglich sind, ist es auch unmöglich vorherzusehen, welche der ausgearbeiteten Lösungsansätze erfolgreich sein werden. Komplexe soziale Probleme sind, was Horst Rittel und Melvin Webber »Wicked Problems« genannt haben. Und ein Charakteristikum dieser Wicked Problems ist, dass es keine unmittelbare und endgültige Bestätigung...

Vom Start-up bis zur reifen Organisation, alle Teams und Organisationen benötigen Kulturarbeit. Im Zeitalter von Globalisierung und digitalem Wettbewerb sind daher vorurteilsfreie Führung und Kulturentwicklung von zentraler Bedeutung. Gerhard Fatzer und Daniel C. Schmid zeigen mit den hier zusammengestellten Texten wichtige Grundlagen von Veränderu...

Werbetext Das Grundlagen­ und Toolbuch gegen kurzlebige Trends in der Management­Community! Der Autor/Die Autorin Gerhard Fatzer, Dr., leitet das Trias Institut für Coaching, Supervision und Organisationsentwicklung in Zürich. Er ist langjähriger Herausgeber der Reihe EHP Organisation mit allen Grundlagentexten der amerikanischen OE Gründer, zudem...

Stocks and their in- and outflows are causally related. Yet they may not be compared with each other for reasons explained in Chap. 5. But the fact is—as Booth Sweeney (2000) and Sterman (2008) have empirically tested—stocks and their flows often are treated as being basically the same and, even worse, that the causal relationship between them is c...

One of the questions Thomas Schelling—who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005—dug into was the enigma why segregation occurs. In his widely cited article, Schelling (1971) observed:

With his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers was the first to treat the question of how innovations spread comprehensively. By diffusion he understood the spread of innovations, through market or nonmarket channels, from first implementation anywhere in the world to other countries and regions and to other markets and firms. So semin...

Start-ups are particularly prone to existential crises. Depending on which sources to trust, between 40% and 90% of them fail within the first 3 years. Of course, there are many reasons for bankruptcy, lack of cash being among most obvious. Accidental adversaries are another for high-tech start-ups. The peculiarity of high-tech start-ups is that th...

What happens in a market when buyers expect a certain product quality only to find out later that the sellers misinformed them? George Akerlof asked this question in the context of used cars. In particular, he wondered why people purchased new cars, rather than purchased used cars. His hypothesis was that people were suspicious of the motives of th...

Evolution has equipped us with the capacity to predict—at least short term. When we successfully catch a ball, we have predicted its path and moved accordingly to be at the right place at the right time. When we overtake a car while another car approaches, we have predicted the feasibility of our maneuver. When we play pool, we not only predict the...

SFD—stock and flow diagram—is the semasiographic language for describing dynamics of systems. But what are SFD “sentences” called that consist of the eight terms or symbols—stock, flow, two types of causal links, two types of causal loops, delay, and sources and sinks—and what is their purpose in managing complexity? This question is the topic of t...

Sir Edward Grey, who had been the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary in the run-up to the Great War, wrote in 1925:This rather bold statement was refuted by Leo Amery on July 20, 1936, in the House of Commons when he said:Be that as it may, Lewis Richardson (1939) was inspired by these points of view. Richardson was an English mathematician who pio...

Fixed assets—items like land and buildings, motor vehicles, furniture, office equipment, computers, fixtures and fittings, and machinery and industrial robots—require maintenance. The more fixed assets a company has, the more maintenance is necessary. In addition, while fixed assets are depreciated over time, maintenance increases with age. With au...

Natural language, or ordinary language, is any system of communication that has evolved in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation, says Wikipedia. Its purpose typically is that we can interact in more sophisticated ways than, say, wolves when hunting or bees when collecting nectar or fish when schooling. Natur...

When William Lloyd gave his two lectures at Oxford University in 1832, he could not have been aware how prescient his topic was. The topic is so profound further study of it eventually led to the Nobel Prize in Economics for Elinor Ostrom (2014)—so far the only woman awarded that Prize—for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons...

Perception is not a capacity we simply possess but something we learn. What we perceive is not a facet of reality but a conglomerate of external data taken in through all our senses blended with our memories, experiences, values and assumptions. Bateson (1972) argues:

Thus wrote The New York Times on December 20, 2016:How come?

The rise and decline of MySpace is a perfect example of the Limits to Growth: MySpace was a social networking site created in 2003. The user base steadily grew in number, and, at the beginning of 2004, MySpace was officially launched to the public. By the end of that year, MySpace had five million users, making it the fastest growing service at tha...

Why do all humans in good health more or less have the same body temperature? Why don’t steam engines run out of control? Why do bacteria in a Petri dish stop growing? Why are organizations stable? How do social systems meet goals? The answers to those questions go back to the eighteenth century.

How can one find out what decisions to make or what to do to really influence the behavior of some social system? Expressing a problematic dynamic in the language of SFD is certainly a first step but not sufficient for any kind of change. When leaders at the G7 Summit (2015) decided that decarbonization of the global economy over the course of this...

One of the beauties of working with the semasiographic language of SFD—Stock and Flow Diagram—is its potential to find common dynamics between two seemingly different systems. If two SFDs look alike, then no matter how different the elements may appear, their behavior pattern is alike. When such a similarity becomes clear, then understanding the be...

Projects have goals, which nearly always include milestones for time and budget, among others. A project that is finished on time and on budget is considered successful. However, not all projects are successful in this regard. After its launch it soon becomes evident that the project’s time goal or budget goal might have been too ambitious. After d...

Start-ups are confronted with a particularly tricky issue: when and by how much to build up production or service capacity. In its early stage, the priority of a start-up is customer and product development. Without a concrete product and a concrete customer, it’s risky to divert scarce financial and management resources to production capacity. On...

Dynamics—the study of motion—was always that part of natural science and, after graduation, the area of social science that fascinated me most. Of course, statics—the science about systems in equilibrium—was a necessary prerequisite, but it was dynamics that really caught my attention. This might be why music is more interesting to me than painting...

All previous chapters point in the same direction: Social systems are insensitive to most managerial efforts to alter their behavior yet they do have a few sensitive influence points through which behavior can be changed. But even if behavior changes, such change is not necessarily the one managers and policymakers want to bring about. From the ban...

Why do policies and strategies often fail, and what can be done about it? How can complexity be managed in cases where it cannot be reduced? The answers to these questions are anything but trivial, and can only be found by combining insights from complexity science, system dynamics, system theory and systems thinking. Rooted in the seminal works of...

Befürchtungen, dass das Pariser Übereinkommen der Industrie Wettbewerbsnachteile bringt sowie Wertschöpfung und Arbeitsplätze vernichtet, sind nichts grundlegend Neues. Ängste um die Zukunft der Industriegesellschaft kehren in schöner Regelmäßigkeit wieder. Aber sind sie berechtigt?

Welche Realität steckt hinter Begriffen wie Industrie 4.0, vierte industrielle Revolution, Smart Manufacturing, Factories of the Future? Inwiefern verändern Digitalisierung, Hochautomatisierung, Robotik, Vernetzung und 3D-Druck die Arbeitsbedingungen, die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit aber auch die Kunden-Lieferanten-Beziehungen? Christoph Mandl spricht mit...

Purpose – This paper aims to present a system dynamics model for the interdependencies between logistics strategies and freight transport. As efficient freight transport operations are a crucial part within securing the competitiveness of a company, the “right” logistics strategy plays a key role within realization of efficient transportation movem...

This study analyses endeavours of several European cities of becoming Smart Cities. The Kyoto Protocol from 2002 as well as the participation in different energy initiatives play a crucial role. The comparison of the results from the different cities shows that Austria has to become more ambitioned and thorough in the realm of its Smart City strate...

At first glance, the term ‘meeting’ seems clear enough. It’s a gathering with a beginning, a more or less defined end—and most importantly, a purpose. Besides length, purpose and who shows up, most people think that a meeting is just a meeting, there’s no difference between one and another. But it’s not quite that simple.

Enough of talking! Let’s decide what to do and then do it.—When sitting in a coordinating meeting this is not only a common but also a very sensible thing to say. Once the options are clear it is indeed time to choose which road to travel. In Co-creative Meetings, however, things are not that straightforward. Sometimes the options are not clear at...

On November 27, 2001 the first so-called Bonn Conference on Afghanistan began. Thirty-six political leaders, many who had never spoken with one another, met for 9 days to create a road map for the political future of the country. After the conference, when interviewed by journalists, they expressed great contentment with the results.

Christoph was in charge of strategic planning while he worked as assistant to the CEO of a multinational corporation. He would sometimes attend board meetings. In his first meeting strategic issues were on the agenda: positioning on the world market, financing new projects, the future of hundreds of jobs. Christoph was expecting bright conversation...

Co-creative Meetings will become part of an organizational culture when the appropriate attitudes and patterns of behavior have been internalized. A group wanting to become competent in Co-creative Meetings should be willing to practice and reflect regularly and should be ready to suffer setbacks. This is part of any learning process, whether learn...

In the course of implementing and practicing Co-creative Meetings, it became obvious that the impact of such meetings was much greater than anticipated. Listening to stories and reports on successful use of the new paradigm in daily meeting practice, it became more and more apparent that Co-creative Meetings were neither a time-consuming luxury nor...

The seven maxims, the four roles, and the design principles help to build and maintain the container for a Co-creative Meeting. But different situations, contexts and subjects may require working with different choreographies. Additionally, if a team applies Co-creative Meetings for some time and is familiar with the approach—like whistling a well...

“Co-creative meetings” foster invention and innovation, and therefore enable innovative developmental processes in an organizational and inter-organizational context, including strategy development, product development, human resource development, R&D, and trans-organizational projects. This book illustrates the difference between productive and in...

This paper relies on complexity theory to gain new insights into the dynamics of high-technology markets. We are making use of the Pólya process model to explain these dynamics. This classical model highlights the "mechanism" of positive feedback, which gives rise to the phenomenon of path dependence and lock-in.

In Spring 2006 the by then called Austrian BAWAG affair exploded. BAWAG 2 is the fourth largest bank of Austria. It is owned by the Austrian Trade Union. For many years the dividends of BAWAG were a major source of funding for the operation of the Austrian Trade Union. So, the BAWAG affair was not just an example of the every now and then malfuncti...

In this article we introduce you to the “Metalogue Conference,” a type of LargeGroup Intervention, which we started to develop 1998 and which has been an ongoing “work in progress” ever since. It holds some by-now-well-known elements of other “classic” intervention methods, like Open Space (H. Owen) or Dialogue (M. Buber), but rather than focusing...

Internet, Outsourcing der Fertigwarenläger, die Europäisierung der Güterströme sowie die immer weitere Verkürzung des Bestellzyklus bewirken, dass die Distribution der Güter vom Produzenten zum Kunden im Umbruch ist: Alte Transport-Dienstleistungen vergehen, neue entstehen.

The need for incorporating tool management into production planning and control in highly automated systems is well understood. In this paper an application for the design and implementation of a tool management, production management system respectively, is described. One of the objectives of production management in this case is to produce the ca...

Various risk assessment procedures as they apply to liquefied energy gas (LEG) terminal siting are discussed. The risks estimated job for LEG sites are quantified and compared.

This report has three main goals: 1. To present and compare the various procedures of assessment of risk to life and limb as they have been applied to liquefied energy gas (LEG) terminal siting, and in doing so to clarify the limits of knowledge and understanding of LEG risks. 2. To quantify and compare the risks to life and limb at four LEG termin...

This paper presents a state of the art survey of network models and algorithms that can be used as planning tools in irrigation and wastewater systems. It is shown that the problem of designing or extending such systems basically leads to the same type of mathematical optimization model. The difficulty in solving this model lies mainly in the prope...

So far, not much attention has been given to the problem of improving public transportation networks. In many cities these networks have been built sequentially and do not fit to the needs of the users any more. The results are long travel times and an unnecessarily high number of people who have to transfer. Compared to other investments for impro...

Some results on the number of operations, that are needed to update the elimination form of the basis inverse of a linear program and to perform the revised simplex-algorithm, are given for different updating methods.

In diesem Kapitel sollen einige Simulationssprachen etwas genauer charakterisiert werden, um die Entscheidung, in welcher Sprache das Modell programmiert werden soll, zu erleichtern. Ein ganzes Kapitel soll den Simulationssprachen gewidmet sein, da es hier wohl um eine der zentralen Fragen der Simulation geht, denn die richtige Wahl kann Programmie...

Zwischen den sprachlichen Modellen und den mathematischen klafft eine große Lücke. Viele sprachliche Modelle könnten exakter formuliert werden, einfacher analysiert, sind aber doch zu komplex, um sie als mathematisch-analytisches Modell darzustellen. Erst mit der Entwicklung von Computern konnte eine. Lücke geschlossen werden in Form der Simulation...

Zum Abschluß soll noch über eine konkrete Fallstudie berichtet werden, welche im Zusammenhang mit einer organisationssoziologischen Studie an einem psychiatrischen Spital auftrat. Es ergab sich das Problem, den Personalstand an qualifiziertem Pflegepersonal für die nächsten 10–20 Jahre zu prognostizieren, da der Verdacht bestand, daß in diesem Zeit...

In diesem Kapitel wollen wir das Vorgehen bei der Entwicklung eines Simulationsmodells nochmals genauer beschreiben und die Erkenntnisse, welche aus den letzten Kapiteln diesbezüglich gewonnen wurden, zusammenzufassen. Ziel ist nun, die einzelnen Schritte beim Aufbau eines Simulationsmodells zu identifizieren und zu beschreiben. Natürlich hängt die...

In diesem Kapitel Sollen die Methoden zur Analyse vor allem stochastischer und instationärer Simulationsmodelle genauer erörtert werden. Der größte Teil des folgenden Stoffes gehört in das Gebiet der stochastischen Prozesse und wird hier nur rudimentär behandelt. Nach einführenden Definitionen wird das Problem des Einpendeins von Simulationsruns au...

Bislang haben wir uns nur mit Modellen beschäftigt, bei denen der Zeitfortschritt ereignisabhängig war und daher variabel (sogenannte diskrete Modelle). Bestimmte Systeme können aber auf diese Art nicht simuliert werden und man muß dann den Zeitfortschritt als konstant annehmen, d.h. die Zeit springt immer um einen konstanten Betrag vorwärts, um ei...

Als erste praktische Anwendung soll nun der organisatorische Ablauf des Rettungsdienstes von Zürich simuliert werden. Diese Studie wurde zunächst als Übungsbeispiel in der Vorlesung von Th.M.Liebling (1973), behandelt und daran anschließend als Semesterarbeit von J. Polymeris & J.Riera (1974).Wir können hier nur ein vereinfachtes Modell, wie es in...

Wir sind nun soweit, die Frage anzugehen, welches die optimale Strategie für die Spieler ist. Zwei Parameter können wir frei wählen: Einerseits die Kartensumme, bis zu der wir weitere Karten nehmen, andererseits die Kartensumme; bei der wir den Wert einer “As” als 1 bzw. 11 annehmen. In diesem Kapitel wollen wir nun allgemein erörtern, wie man opti...

Wiewohl die Simulationstechnik sich im betriebswirtschaftlichen Bereich, siehe Bauknecht (1976) und Emshoff (1972); als auch im naturwissenschaftlich -technischen Bereich, siehe Schöne (1974 & 1976), einen festen Platz erobert hat, ist die Entwicklung noch voll im Gange. Sowohl im methodischen Bereich durch Verfeinerung der statistischen Analysetec...

In diesem Kapitel soll nun ein im Vergleich zu den beiden vorangehenden Modellen ungleich komplexeres System studiert werden, nämlich das makroökonomische Phänomen der Konjunkturzyklen, Auf Grund der zentralen Bedeutung,welche wirtschaftliche Veränderungen für den einzelnen haben, ist die Literatur darüber dementsprechend umfangreich. Existieren ve...

Simulation ist eine Technik, die, um sie mit Erfolg anwenden zu kOnnen, Erfahrung erfordert. Es ist daher wichtig, den Stoff nicht nur "im Prinzip" zu beherrschen, sondern sich der MUhe zu unterziehen, den Proze der Umsetzung von der analysierten Wirklichkeit bis zum funktionierenden Computerprogramm selbst durchzumachen. Eingedenk dieser Erkenntni...