Systems Thinking and The Beer Game

How do systems behave, and what can we learn from supply chain dysfunction?

This lecture (click the picture) is for anyone on my feed… but in particular it’s for students in my class who should have just completed the Root Beer Game simulation. If you’re a student in my class, do the sim first, and then come back to this… you’ll just get more from the learning experience… but this video is also designed to be stand-alone. The online Sim was developed by Harvard Business School, based on a board game version developed by MIT in the 1960’s to help in understanding supply chains. But I use it as a learning device in Systems Thinking, based on the book "The Fifth Discipline" by Peter Senge. He discusses the sim as “a microcosm on how organizations function”, and that it “reveals that problems originate in our basic ways of thinking and interacting”.

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As an instructor, rarely does life so quickly reaffirm an abstract concept that I cover in class, but I teach automotive engineering managers near Detroit, and just two weeks after we ran the simulation in my 2021 class, their auto factories shut down due to a lack of integrated circuits. This was just a few months after the great toilet paper shortage of 2020, and just before the supply chain challenges seen in response to the COVID pandemic. Pandemics are tragic, but we need to learn from them, and this lecture is a small step in that goal.