Introduction to System Dynamics
MIT's Sloan School offers this course on systems thinking and system dynamics modeling, applied to corporate strategy, organizational change, and policy design. Students work through simulation models and management flight simulators, including cases on business cycles, growth strategy, and diffusion dynamics, to see how feedback loops and time delays produce counterintuitive behavior in organizations. The course materials include lecture notes, assigned readings, problem sets, and simulation exercises built around software modeling of stocks and flows. Rather than treating strategy as a static plan, the course frames organizations as dynamic systems where short-term fixes often create long-term problems, and it trains students to build and test their own models of real management situations. Offered through MIT OpenCourseWare, the full syllabus, assignments, and simulation tools are available at no cost, though there is no certificate or instructor interaction since this is a self-paced archive of an MIT class originally taught by systems dynamics scholar John Sterman.