Moving online: reflections from conducting system dynamics workshops in virtual settings

Field: Decision Sciences (Social Sciences)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become increasingly important and necessary to conduct research and teaching activities online. While many universities quickly started the transition to online teaching, most in-person research activities were typically postponed. However, in order to not significantly delay research, researchers are increasingly seeking to conduct activities, such as workshops, in a virtual setting. Following this initial period of disruption, it is expected that many online or hybrid activities will continue to be used and, in some cases, may replace in-person interactions due to cost, time, convenience, and environmental concerns after the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Researchers and/or stakeholders are often geographically dispersed, which independently motivates the use of online or hybrid workshop activities. Different types of online activities and tools related to system dynamics have existed for some time. They include interactive simulation environments such as Climate Interactive's widely used C-ROADS and En-ROADS models (e.g. Rooney-Varga et al., 2020) as well as purpose-built solutions for single workshops (e.g. Eker et al., 2018). There is online system dynamics training (https://www.systemdynamics.org/online-course-catalog) and programmes (Pavlov et al., 2014), and researchers have reported about online peer mentoring groups (Richardson et al., 2015; Suprun et al., 2020). The 2020 International Conference of the System Dynamics Society ran online and included a workshop by Michael Bean on delivering online simulations, particularly in teaching contexts. In addition, fuelled by the effects of COVID-19, the idea of online system dynamics workshops is gaining prominence. Virtual delivery of workshops has been reported sparsely in the areas of problem-structuring methods and group-support systems (Yearworth and White, 2017, 2019), and there is a single recent contribution in the area of system dynamics (Wilkerson et al., 2020). It is time to further discuss the practicalities of moving workshops online and make some recommendations for effective online workshop delivery. Here, we report on three cases of conducting system dynamics workshops online: first, confirmatory/disconfirmatory workshops that included online participants because of an internationally diverse project team; second, an En-ROADS Climate Workshop that was part of an online system dynamics lecture; and third, group model building (GMB) and project prioritisation workshops moved online in response to social-distancing restrictions during the COVID-19 lockdown. We describe these three cases and insights derived from them for online system dynamics workshop delivery and then discuss implications and future research avenues. This section presents the three rather different case settings. We present them chronologically from a first international online workshop in 2018 to recent activities in 2020.ii Author involvement in workshops: first Tower Refurbishment workshop: NZ, MT, HS, IH, TK; second Tower Refurbishment workshop: NZ, KD, TC, MT, HS, IH, TK; teaching case: NZ; Thamesmead group model-building workshops: IP, NZ; Thamesmead prioritisation workshop: IP, GS, NZ. In October 2018 and June 2019, we conducted two confirmatory/disconfirmatory workshops which included online participation and had seven to eight participants, excluding the facilitator(s). The workshops were part of an international research project that developed recommendations for refurbishments of residential tower blocks to improve their energy efficiency and involved team members from Canada and the United Kingdom (see Stopps et al., 2020). The confirmatory/disconfirmatory workshop setting serves validation purposes and is inspired by the disconfirmatory interviews (Andersen et al., 2012) and the Model Review script (Scriptapedia Wikibooks contributors, n.d.). It presents an existing causal loop diagram (CLD) to participants and asks them for structure confirmation or improvement and/or adaptation to a slightly different (e.g. geographical) context. The first workshop served to review U.K.-based CLDs and to investigate similarities and differences to the Canadian context. It lasted around five hours and was facilitated by a team member via Skype for Business software from London. Three further project team members participated online, and two team members and two Canadian practitioners participated jointly from a meeting room in Toronto. We slowly unfolded and walked through five existing CLDs that represented the U.K. context of tower refurbishment, and the group discussed similarities and differences to the Canadian context (see Table 1). This first workshop gave Canadian participants a sound understanding of the U.K. context and its complexity and was thus a great preparation for the second workshop. Eight months later, the U.K. project team hosted a second three-hour workshop in London, joined online by the Toronto project team. It served the purpose of adding a resident perspective to four of the U.K.-based CLDs, and it served stakeholders to make their perspective heard. We presented the CLDs to two subgroups of physically attending stakeholders from a Neighbourhood Forum, the community group alliance Just Space, and a resident-managed social housing association. The Canadian colleagues attended online via laptops that were placed on each of the group tables at the London workshop location, and they were asked to be nondominant participants, just coming in occasionally with questions or comments based on their subject-matter expertise. An overview of the agenda of this second workshop is given in Table 2, and details are described in the online supplement to this article. Overall, the workshops allowed for cross-country learning among participants, and they were very helpful for developing recommendations for refurbishments of residential tower blocks. While not perfect, the online setting allowed us to have a conversation which would otherwise not have been possible due to geographic distance. Next, we report on a two-hour En-ROADS Climate Workshop that took place on 17 March 2020. The purpose of this workshop was to educate students about climate change and show them some of the breadth of system dynamics applications. It was part of a 3-hour lecture of the Systems Thinking and System Dynamics module at University College London that had been moved online for COVID-19-related reasons. The lecture used Blackboard Collaborate Ultra software, which is a seminar teaching tool. It has similar functionality to a conference-call software (e.g. audio and video participation, sharing slides or the entire screen, chat): it allowed students to raise their hands if they wanted to say something and the use of break-out sessions during which subgroups of students could talk and chat among themselves. The En-ROADS Climate Workshop is a shorter version of the Climate Action Simulation Game and aims at creating awareness for climate change and the energy, economic growth, and land-use policies needed to achieve climate goals (https://www.climateinteractive.org/tools/). This specific workshop used Climate Interactive's materials and followed many of their suggestions for in-person workshop design (Jones et al., 2019). The workshop process is listed in Table 3. Overall, there is some room for improvement, but for the first online workshop, it worked well. Students seemed to appreciate the online session despite it being unfamiliar to them. A series of three GMB workshops plus a prioritisation workshop were held as part of a larger participatory collaboration with stakeholders about the Thamesmead region south-east of London. The Thamesmead region is characterised by high levels of social housing, a large Black community, future improved connectivity to the public transport network, and plans to build 20,000 new homes. Between April and June 2020, two members of the London-based team conducted a series of three short GMB workshops online, which replaced a full-day in-person workshop with one of our stakeholder subgroups. The series of GMB workshops focused on the shared concern: "to sustain and increase the quality of the Built, Blue and Green environment to ensure long term stewardship in Thamesmead." They aimed to map the stakeholder subgroup's system boundary and understanding of how quality and stewardship can be enhanced. The online series of workshops involved a small group of five stakeholders from the same organisation in total, with two to four attending each individual workshop. Stakeholders and facilitators attended online via individual computers. After an introduction of the purpose of the meeting, a brief introduction about CLDs at the first workshop or a recap at subsequent workshops, the main part of the workshops was devoted to GMB activities (see Table 4). One facilitator acted as the modeller and shared her screen with Vensim modelling software open and a second acted as the main facilitator, with the modeller intervening as questions arose. Details are described in the online supplement. In July 2020, the same facilitator and modeller and an additional new member from the London team conducted a prioritisation workshop online with a more diverse group of 12 participants representing seven organisations. This workshop served to present and discuss subgroups' similarities and differences concerning the problem boundaries and agree on a prioritised starting point for quantitative modelling. The workshop agenda is shown in Table 5. We mostly used Microsoft Teams software for these workshops but switched to Zoom software one time because of stakeholder preferences. In addition, the facilitators used a WhatsApp software channel to communicate privately with each other at the prioritisation workshop. Overall, the team felt that the setting worked very well and participants emphasised their appreciation of the online activities. We could even increase participation by holding workshops online. This is likely because of the shorter duration and because the online setting did not require participants to travel, which easily takes 30–90 minutes one way in London. This article presented three rather diverse cases of moving system dynamics workshops online. They include a broad spectrum of participatory online workshop activities and purposes ranging from using an existing simulation model to improving CLDs, to building CLDs from scratch. The article showed that conducting these diverse workshop activities virtually is feasible and can often work similarly well as in-person workshops. The examples covered diverse research and teaching settings. They also included different types of online participation. The En-ROADS Climate Workshop, the GMB workshops, and the prioritisation workshops were exclusively online with everybody participating via their own computer or tablet. The tower refurbishment workshops were of hybrid nature: the first workshop brought the facilitator in online, and the second workshop incorporated some online participants into an otherwise in-person setting. This shows that the system dynamics activities are both highly adaptable and resistant to the varying nature of specific circumstances. We found the fully online workshops easier to run, and future research could thus put special emphasis on exploring how to fruitfully collaborate in hybrid settings. Our cases used diverse online meeting platforms, and we found that virtual system dynamics workshops can work well using meeting software with basic audio-visual and chat functions together with basic system dynamics software functionality on the modeller's computer, given stable Internet connections. A hands-up feature can become useful in larger group settings. Whiteboard features may enhance the possibility to effectively collaborate, with all participants actively pointing to and/or modifying what is shared. However, it is important to consider user friendliness and participants' online literacy and access to and familiarity with a certain platform. We also found the video-recording feature of the platforms useful because it allows us to easily go back into the workshop setting for reporting and research purposes. We found that small and short workshops led to more fruitful engagement. Thus, dividing a full-day workshop into a sequence of several individual workshops is effective. In the larger and more complex settings of the prioritisation workshop, we found an external communication channel among the facilitators very useful. It cannot replace the exchange of diverse cues between the facilitators, e.g. eye contact, confirmatory nodding and smiling, or a blank look and request for help. But together with strategically placed breaks, it is an improvement over no communication. Some of the workshops brought together groups from different countries. Online workshops may thus not only be a temporary solution during COVID-19 times, but they can serve the purpose of bringing together geographically dispersed participants more generally (see also Yearworth and White, 2019). Even for stakeholders located in a similar geographical region, the ability to participate online seems to have increased participation. This can make online workshops a valid option in certain settings because of their positive implications on travel needs and time effort, emissions, and climate change. Our cases thus show that system dynamics scripts allow for resilient workshop settings, including online workshops. Thus, we recommend conducting system dynamics workshops virtually, when needed. This could help establish a similar knowledge base as we have for in-person settings. To build up such a knowledge base, it would be useful to further address questions related to the design and impact of virtual workshops and engagements. Specific questions for further research that our three cases sparked for the system dynamics and wider research community are listed below. We gratefully acknowledge the time and effort of the system dynamics workshop participants of the Tower Refurbishment, CAMELLIA, and CUSSH projects without whom the validation of the causal loop diagrams would not have been possible. The Tower Refurbishment case presented in this article was funded by the University of Toronto and the University College London through their Joint Research Projects and Exchange Activities Programme, and the Thamesmead case was funded by the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (CAMELLIA project, ref. no. NE/S003495/1) and by the Wellcome Trust (CUSSH project, ref. no. 209387/Z/17/Z). Appendix S1. Supporting Information Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.