Pål Ingebrigt Davidsen honoured at the International System Dynamics Conference 2024

The System Dynamics Lifetime Achievement Award

The System Dynamics Society presents the Lifetime Achievement Award to extraordinary individuals who have made significant contributions to the field over an extended period of time. This award is based on a collective body of work done over a lifetime and not on a single article. Since its inception in 2012, the award has been handed out sparingly, with Prof. Davidsen being the 7th recipient in the Society's history.

The Lifetime Achievement of Pål Davidsen

Over several decades, Prof. Davidsen has contributed to the System Dynamics (SD) field in areas of research, teaching, and institution building.

In his early career, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where System Dynamics was founded, as a Visiting Scholar in 1985 and 1990-1991. There, he collaborated with the founder Jay Forrester and other prominent system dynamicists on several projects on energy modelling and pre-college education. Notably, Prof. Davidsen was Associate Chair of Road Maps, the pre-college education project that developed an extensive set of instructional lessons for building systems thinking intuition and formal modelling skills.

Not long after returning to UiB, Prof. Davidsen was asked by the then University President to establish an international Master’s as well as PhD programme in System Dynamics. With the first cohort of students enrolled in the fall semester of 1995, the UiB System Dynamics Group was officially founded as an autonomous research group within the university. Under the leadership of Prof. Davidsen, spanning over 27 years, the SD Group stood out as the European hub for System Dynamics teaching and research. The group has since graduated more than 600 master students and 40 PhD candidates from all over the world, many of whom have been supervised by Prof. Davidsen.  

In 2010, Prof. Davidsen extended the reach of System Dynamics in Europe by jointly founding the European Master Program in System Dynamics (EMSD) with Radboud University in the Netherlands, the University of Palermo in Italy, and the New University of Lisbon in Portugal. The program was supported by the European Union with scholarships for talented students for several years.

Apart from building prominent System Dynamics institutions in Europe, Prof. Davidsen has dedicated his life to teaching and nurturing the next generation of system dynamicists. He has designed and delivered several courses that leverage on simulation models, interactive learning environments, and distance-learning platforms. In his acceptance speech and lecture, Prof. Davidsen recounted that his teaching revolves around 5 basic principles, which he has instilled in his students time and again:

1. In the interaction between stocks and flows, there are accumulations that are time-consuming processes, often termed delays or lags.
2. Feedback is a causal "circularity" of time-consuming process that, in fact, produced not a circle, but a spiral across time.
3. Non-linearity produces the mutual interaction, or synergy, of feedback that constitutes the core source of dynamic complexity.
4. Dynamic behavior is made up of a continuous sequence of system states, produced, and thus governed, by the system structure.
5. Each state of a dynamic development, feeds back to that structure; the gains of each feedback loop and can, over time, influence the relative significance of those loops and, thus, their production of subsequent dynamics. 

What we usually say is that structure creates behavior. We should continue and say that not only does structure create behavior, but such behavior feeds back to change, endogenously, the very structure that generated behavior and generates new behavior subsequently.
—Pål Davidsen

In the realm of research, Prof. Davidsen has applied System Dynamics to a broad array of domains, including waste management, healthcare management, petroleum life cycle, and electricity generation. He has contributed to several large-scale research projects, including the UNEP African Landscapes project, Belmont Forum Coast Card project, and EU Horizon projects on impact assessment and renewable resource transition. Over decades, he has also contributed to the System Dynamics methodology for loop dominance analysis and techniques for model formulation, analysis, and policy design. After his retirement from UiB, Prof. Davidsen continues his research at Riga Technical University, where he is currently developing national-scale models on school reforms as well as greenhouse gas emissions reduction.

Prof. Davidsen has also directly contributed to the System Dynamics Society, where has served in multiple leadership positions within the society for several years. He has sat on the Policy Council (1993-1995), chaired various committees in the society's activities (1995-2014), was the President of the Society in 2003, and was recently the Vice President of Publications (2015-2017).

In his closing remarks of his acceptance speech, Prof. Davidsen projected a beautiful landscape of the Norwegian fjords and concluded:

When you contemplate by the fjord and long for the highest peaks, it is not merely the accomplishment you aim for. It is perhaps that change in perspective, the overview of rich connectivities, the new challenges, and the amazing opportunities in this wide horizon, under ever changing circumstances that we face. Isn't that what System Dynamics is all about? 
—Pål Davidsen

On behalf of the UiB System Dynamics Group, we are immensely proud of the phenomenal contributions and accomplishments of Pål Ingebrigt Davidsen. Congratulations! His legacy will live on in the Group as we continue to be a "lighthouse" for the System Dynamics field.