DESIMMAL modeling, simulation, animal-farm system

DESIMMAL
Management science: Decision making through systems thinking (Daellenbach & McNickle, 2005)

Except for the most trivial daily actions, most decision making happens within the context of systems — all sorts of organizations, from family units to major corporations, from local government to international institutions, and all sorts of activities and operations. You may wonder: “Since science has been one of the major driving forces of modern civilization, why don’t we simply use the scientific method for decision making? Hasn’t it proved itself highly successfully in the biological and physical sciences and, by extension, in all branches of engineering?” There are a number of reasons! First, experts in science and the philosophy of science do not agree on what the scientific method really is. There are also serious claims and much anecdotal evidence that what sets scientists and researchers on the path of successful breakthroughs are often ingenious hunches and that the scientific method is only used after the fact to confirm the results. But even disregarding these controversies, most real-life decision making does not neatly fall into a pattern of observation, followed by generating hypotheses, which are then confirmed or refuted through experimentation. Most importantly though, while scientific research attempts to understand the various aspects of the world we live in, decision making attempts to change aspects of this world. Furthermore, decision making does not occur under idealized conditions in a laboratory, but out in the real and often messy and turbulent world. So the methodology has to be able to cope with the complexity of the real world, and must be comprehensive and flexible while still delivering the results in the often short time frame within which most decision making has to occur. Nor is it so important that the methodology used satisfies strict scientific principles of inquiry. It is more important that it leads to good decision making.bach