Forrester: An Acknowledgement

As you can see from the transcript, I headed down the Charles River to MIT’s Sloan School of Management and took from Professor Forrester a couple of eye-opening basic courses in what he called, in those days, “Industrial Dynamics.”

Enough has been published¹ about Forrester’s insights and techniques: I won’t address the substance of the topic. I do need to outline the consequences of his work for me: he transformed my previous understandings about human knowledge and how people should apply it. His thought has infused my entire professional life and my life as a thinking and a knowing and an inferring person.

My (prize-winning if, ever since, obscure) doctoral thesis reported a first attempt to apply Forresterian concepts and techniques to policy development in a national educational system.
Clark Abt hired me in 1968, after I applied a Forresterian critique to a simulation model he was developing.
While working for Abt Associates, I spent some years in charge of technical quality review for all the Company’s written products; to a large degree, I credit Forrester with any conceptual clarity I may have brought to the task.
To this day (2011), thanks to Jay, I find myself able confidently to dismiss² most causal assertions that “experts” put forth, especially when they hang them on statistical arguments.

¹You might wish to start from his official Web page.
²And sometimes, perhaps, even to improve…

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