By Eric Roston
John Sterman (click here) has spent his life explaining why big systems fail.
A professor at MIT Sloan School of Management since the early 1980s, his research extends from global supply chain disruptions to the collapse of the biosphere. He literally wrote the book on how to manage complexity, Business Dynamics, and has guided generations of MBA students and executives. Now he focuses on sustainability and climate change.
Sterman likes to start his presentations with a devastating assessment of how well facts, diagrams and figures change people’s minds: “Research,” he deadpans, “shows that showing people research doesn’t work.”
What does work is playing games. The latest game takes the shape of an easy-to-use, deceptively sophisticated model called En-ROADS that turns hypothetical policy scenarios into climate impacts, projected out to the year 2100....
