This study explores the application of systemic design approaches used in a complex commercial context to create positive and sustainable change. The case study was a business case on sustainable parenthood, in which the company tried to balance its ambitions for environmental sustainability with the need to survive in a highly competitive market. In close collaboration with the internal business company stakeholders, a causal loop diagram was created. The diagram mapped relations between global relevant trends for emerging young adults within the DACH market, sustainability, and parenting as a business. Leverage points for systemic change were identified which were explored through in-depth user interviews (n=10). This process eventually identified ten systemic insights, translated into insight cards to facilitate business actions.Based on these combined approaches, the MINT framework (Mapping Interventions and Narratives for Transformation) was developed, with a strong emphasis on co-creation, iteration, translation, and communication of systemic interventions. However, while the internal business stakeholders and company representatives appreciated the bird’s eye view that systemic design gave them, they were challenged by the methods’ abstract language and translation of systemic insights into concrete action. To address this, the developed framework utilized systemic design artefacts such as a storytelling map and user-centred insight cards to facilitate a more comprehensible systemic design approach.Overall, this study provides a first attempt at creating an actionable systemic design framework that can be used in commercial settings to promote positive systemic change. Future research will require further validation.
Although stressors are frequently linked to several negative health outcomes, experiencing stressors may be necessary for enhancing performance. At present, the literature is lacking a unified, comprehensive framework that accounts for both positive and negative outcomes following stressors. Therefore, we introduce the framework of hormesis, which has been applied in biological research for decades. According to hormesis, small-to-medium doses of a stressor can stimulate an organism's response, while large doses cause detrimental effects. In this article, we argue that these dose-response dynamics can be found in various domains of performance psychology (i.e., eustress and distress, psychological momentum, emotions, motivation, confidence, cognitive performance, training, skill acquisition, adversity, and trauma). Furthermore, hormesis also accounts for the inter- and intra-individual variability commonly found in responses to stressors. Finally, from an applied perspective, leveraging hormesis may stimulate new psychological interventions that mimic the well-known effects of (toxic) vaccinations at the level of behavior.
This paper presents an innovative approach that combines optimization and simulation techniques for solving scheduling problems under uncertainty. We introduce an Opt–Sim closed-loop feedback framework (Opt–Sim) based on a sliding-window method, where a simulation model is used for evaluating the optimized solution with inherent uncertainties for scheduling activities. The specific problem tackled in this paper, refers to the airport capacity management under uncertainty, and the Opt–Sim framework is applied to a real case study (Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, France). Different implementations of the Opt–Sim framework were tested based on: parameters for driving the Opt–Sim algorithmic framework and parameters for riving the optimization search algorithm. Results show that, by applying the Opt–Sim framework, potential aircraft conflicts could be reduced up to 57% over the non-optimized scenario. The proposed optimization framework is general enough so that different optimization resolution methods and simulation paradigms can be implemented for solving scheduling problems in several other fields.
