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Today's problems often arise as unintended consequences of yesterday's solutions. Business and public policy settings suffer from policy resistance, the tendency for well-intentioned interventions to be defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself. Just as an airline uses flight simulators to help pilots learn, system dynamics enables us to create management flight simulators to avoid policy resistance and design more effective policies. System dynamics is also a process for working with high-level teams designed to improve the chances for implemented results. This article discusses how system dynamics can be used effectively to design high-leverage policies for sustainable improvement and introduces the next three articles in this issue discussing the application of system dynamics to a variety of critical issues facing business leaders today.

Today's managers face a paradox. On the one hand, the number of tools, techniques, and technologies available to improve operational performance is growing rapidly. On the other hand, despite dramatic success in a few companies, most efforts to use them fail to produce significant results. To understand and resolve this paradox, this article investigates the difficulties organizations face in implementing processes and techniques such as lean production, TQM, computer-aided design and development tools, stage-gate product development processes, and improved customer service systems. The inability of most organizations to reap the full benefit of these innovations has little to do with the specific technique. Instead, the problem has its roots in how the introduction of a new improvement effort interacts with the physical, economic, social, and psychological structures in which implementation takes place. Presents a framework to understand how these failures arise and illustrates strategies for overcoming the pathological behavior through case studies of successful improvement.