The Jay W. Forrester Award was recently presented to John Carroll, Brad Morrison and Jenny Rudolph at the 30th International System Dynamics Conference, held at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. The Forrester Award recognizes the best work in the field of system dynamics published in the previous five years. Doctors Carroll, Morrison and Rudolph were recognized for their paper, “The dynamics of action-oriented problem solving: linking interpretation and choice,” published in the Academy of Management Review in 2009 (full citation: Rudolph, J, Morrison, J. B., Carroll, J. (2009) The dynamics of action-oriented problem solving: linking interpretation and choice. Academy of Management Review. 34(4): 733-756.) It was based on Dr. Rudolph’s doctoral dissertation conducted at the Center for Medical Simulation (CMS).
The paper develops and tests a formal system dynamics model of sensemaking and action, using anesthesia as the empirical setting. The data for the study came from simulated cases carried out at the Center for Medical Simulation and provides a large sample of fine-grained observational and quantitative data from a controlled environment. The model is tightly grounded in the data and gives insight into the feedbacks between sensemaking and action that can cause anesthesiologists both to discover and fail to discover and correct a common diagnostic problems.
Everyone at CMS congratulates Dr. Rudolph, Dr. Carroll and Dr. Morrison on this outstanding achievement.
