Jay Wright Forrester

“Pestel was a very forceful person and quickly saw the power of system dynamics.”

“No plea about inadequacy of our understanding of the decision-making processes can excuse us from estimating decision making criteria. To omit a decision point is to deny its presence – a mistake of far greater magnitude than any errors in our best estimate of the process.”

“[The engineer] must identify the significant and critical problems, but in his education, problems have been predetermined and assigned. He must develop the judgment to know what solutions to problems are possible, but in school the problems encountered are known to have answers. He should be excited by new and unsolved challenges, but for 20 years he has lived in an educational system where he knows he is repeating the work of last year's students.”

“In concept a feedback system is a closed system. Its dynamic behavior arises within its internal structure. Any action which is essential to the behavior of the mode being investigated must be included inside the system boundary.”

“Formulating a model of a system should start from the question “Where is the boundary, that encompasses the smallest number of components, within which the dynamic behavior under study is generated?””