What is Jay Forrester?

Jay Forrester was an American engineer and the founder of system dynamics, the field that models complex systems using stocks, flows, and feedback loops, originally to help industrial companies understand why their operations produced boom-and-bust cycles that no individual manager seemed to be causing on purpose.

Forrester later applied his methods at a global scale in 'World Dynamics,' work that directly inspired 'The Limits to Growth,' and his insistence that counterintuitive behavior in complex systems comes from structure, not from bad decisions by individuals, remains one of the founding insights of modern systems thinking.