McKinsey Classics: Inventing the future

McKinsey Classics | December 2016

Jay Forrester, who died on November 16, was the technocratic visionary who created system dynamics, a way of “inventing the future” that uses feedback loops and other now-common techniques to determine the intended and unintended effects of human activity. As a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, he extended these ideas from industrial operations to business strategy, employment cycles, social problems, and the fate of the world. Read “The beginning of system dynamics,” a fascinating 1995 McKinsey Quarterly essay recently republished on McKinsey.com to honor Jay Forrester’s prescient body of work.

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