[DSRP Evidence](https://dsrpevidence.org/) # Is System Dynamics Made of DSRP? ## Details **Authors** Cabrera, Derek **Year** 2026 **Publisher** Journal of Systems Thinking **Kind of work** article **Discipline** Systems Science [Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.54120/jost.v26i1.dc6sdos6) 10.54120/jost.v26i1.dc6sdos6 ## In authors' words ### Abstract System dynamics (SD) is among the most formally developed traditions in systems thinking and is sometimes conflated with systems thinking itself. Its distinctive constructs – variables, causal links, feedback loops, stocks, flows, delays, boundaries, and related higher-order structures – provide a powerful language for representing and studying dynamic behavior. DSRP-484 makes a more elemental onto-epistemic claim: organization itself is generated through four recursively enclosed Patterns – Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, and Perspectives – composed of eight elemental roles and governed by four structural dynamics. This paper asks whether the organizational structures distinctive to system dynamics require anything outside DSRP-484. Using the O-Theory distinction between information and organization, X = I x O, we develop a structural-remainder test that decomposes SD constructs until either their organization is fully generated by DSRP-484 or an irreducible residual remains. Variables decompose as distinguished identities; stocks as quantified part-whole Systems; flows as quantified Relationships that change Systems; feedback loops as Systems of recursively linked Relationships; delays as temporal information carried by Relationships or as decomposable process-Systems; boundaries as recursively enclosed DSRP structures; and aggregation and disaggregation as recursive part-whole transformations. Mathematical and computational machinery used by SD – including differential equations, numerical integration, and simulation – is not distinctive SD ontology and therefore does not enlarge the organizational basis supplied by SD itself. We then apply the structural-remainder test to a pre-committed candidate set of 60 constructs drawn from the field's own vocabulary under a fixed extraction rule. All 60 decompose without requiring an additional organizational primitive. No residual X is identified. The result supports strict structural containment: O_SD is properly contained in Cl(O_DSRP-484). The result also has a methodological implication. If SD's characteristic constructs are specialized composites rather than organizational primitives, beginning inquiry with stocks, flows, feedback, and delays can bias the analyst toward seeing the organization those forms are designed to represent. DSRP can instead operate upstream: first determining what distinctions, systems, relationships, and perspectives the phenomenon contains, and only then determining which of those structures should be instantiated in an SD model – a workflow already demonstrated by Caddell and Nilchiani in their construction of a system dynamics model of interpersonal trust. System dynamics therefore remains a powerful domain-specific modeling method, but both its organizational foundations and the thinking used to construct its models can be situated within a more elemental organizational calculus. ### What they set out to do (purpose) First run in the structural-containment series. Asks whether the organizational structures distinctive to system dynamics require any primitive outside DSRP-484, using a pre-committed extraction rule and a decision rule fixed before any construct was examined. ### What they found (results) Sixty canonical constructs entered the candidate set under the extraction rule, with seventeen exclusions logged by category. All sixty decompose without requiring an additional organizational primitive: twenty-one in Sections 4–13, twenty-four in Section 16, twelve as composites of already-decomposed elements, and three as purely informational. No residual X was identified anywhere, which Cabrera reports as strict containment rather than mere containment. Three further findings emerged that the test was not designed to produce. First, constructs SD treats as straightforward properties of a model – model order, behavior mode, credibility, and where a boundary is drawn – carry substantial Perspective structure the field's vocabulary does not name. Second, the strongest apparent candidate for a residual did not produce one: a generic Relationship never promised proportionality, so nonlinearity is an informational constraint rather than a new organizational primitive. Third, a methodological implication – if stocks, flows, feedback and delays are specialized composites, starting there can bias the analyst toward the organization those forms are built to represent, whereas DSRP can operate upstream. ## Commentary ### In short Our reading: this is the run that fixed the protocol the network science and UML papers then reused unchanged – the information/organization decision rule, the pre-committed candidate set drawn only from the field's own documents, the logged exclusions, and the residual category X that gives the test a way to fail. Its bearing on DSRP is that the most formally specified tradition in systems thinking, the one with real equations and a simulator, yields no structure the calculus cannot generate. The Perspective finding is the more interesting secondary result: P turns up throughout SD's own vocabulary while going unnamed, which is the same asymmetry the Cognitive Pareto Law predicts. ### In more detail Nominating sources for C_SD: the field's official glossary (Ford), every construct named as a foundation or thread in Richardson's reflections, and Forrester's statement of the field's subject matter ("high-order nonlinear feedback structures"). Sterman's textbook glossary serves as a robustness check – any construct defined there but absent from the nominators can be appended under the same filter without disturbing an existing ruling. Exclusion categories, pre-declared: numerical or mathematical procedure, modeling practice, notation artifact, general term, imported theory. Decision rule: a feature is organizational if changing it changes what entities or relationships exist, or how they are distinguished, bounded, nested, ordered, related, or framed; informational if it changes only the content or value instantiated in a structure that remains. Cabrera states the strongest objection to his own scoping himself – Forrester held continuity to be constitutive of SD, not borrowed – and answers it three ways, the structural one being that the continuous/discrete choice sets the grain of a temporal Perspective while leaving the point-view structure intact. Construct-by-construct rulings, proposed decompositions and the exclusion log ship as a supplementary instrument available on request. **Patterns it shows** D, S, R, P Shows the structure is there, Shows it makes a difference **How to cite this** Cabrera, Derek (2026). Is System Dynamics Made of DSRP?. Journal of Systems Thinking.