---
id: people/john-sterman
about:
  label: John Sterman
  description: >-
    Director of the MIT System Dynamics Group, author of the textbook Business
    Dynamics, who builds interactive simulations for learning about complex
    systems, including climate policy.
  tags:
    - system dynamics
    - simulation games
    - climate policy
person:
  affiliation: MIT Sloan School of Management
  role: system dynamicist
  homepage: 'https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: John D. Sterman (MIT Sloan)
      url: 'https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman'
    - title: John Sterman (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sterman'
    - title: >-
        WORLD CLIMATE: A Role-Play Simulation of Climate Negotiations (Crossref
        record)
      url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1177/1046878113514935'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
John D. Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He directs the MIT System Dynamics Group and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.[^1] He was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and took his PhD at MIT Sloan in 1982.[^2]

His research is on decision-making in complex systems: corporate strategy and operations, energy policy, public health, environmental sustainability and climate change.[^1] He pioneered "management flight simulators", interactive simulations of corporate and economic systems that companies and governments use for training.[^1] He wrote the textbook Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World (2000) and edited Modeling for Learning Organizations (1994) with John Morecroft.[^1,2] He has twice won the Jay W. Forrester Prize for the best published work in system dynamics, and the System Dynamics Society's Best Application Award for his work on climate change policy.[^1]

He is first author, with eight colleagues, of the 2014 paper in Simulation & Gaming that sets out how to run the [World Climate Simulation](/communication/world-climate-simulation/), a role-play of climate negotiations.[^3]