The Ackoff Center Weblog provides an opportunity to keep up with the latest research in Systems Thinking. It is also a forum where you can interact with others in the field and share your own experiences.
June 30, 2022
“Systems Thinking” announced as 2022-2023 Common Experience theme
The Common Experience at Texas State University has announced that the 2022-2023 theme will be "Systems Thinking." Texas State presents an engaging academic theme each year, providing numerous opportunities for everyone — students, faculty, staff, and community members. Systems Thinking was chosen as the Common Experience theme for 2022-2023 because students are made of, surrounded by, and embedded in systems from the moment they enter the world. When they choose to attend Texas State, they choose to insert themselves into one of the most impactful systems of their lives — one that will allow them to change the world. When one understands a system, one can better navigate it. When one can navigate a system, one can advocate for change. As part of the Common Experience, all incoming first-year students receive a critically acclaimed book related to the year’s theme. Students discuss the book in their University Seminar class and other courses. The 2022-2023 Common Reading book is Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O'Neil. First-year students will receive a free copy during Bobcat Welcome Week. The Common Experience team encourages and welcomes interdisciplinary collaboration. To discuss the theme, events, and activities planned for the 2022-2023 academic year, contact (512) 245-3579 or [email protected].
I inquire about the meaning of education in our fast-changing world.
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Primary school students enjoy discovering interdependencies in the world around them.
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We live in a world of complex, interconnected systems. They range from big corporations and the Earth’s biosphere to social networks and our own bodies. Complex systems have many components that interact with each other in dynamic patterns. They chug along quietly and uneventfully until, one day, they unexpectedly turn our world upside down. Hurricanes and pandemics, elections and market crashes - all inevitable products of complex systems - ceaselessly remind us of our limited understanding of the world. What’s missing is the ability to notice and comprehend the counterintuitive nature of complex systems. This ability, called “systems thinking,” is recognized by educators, scientists and entrepreneurs as one of the most valuable skills for the 21st century.
The concept of systems thinking was introduced several decades ago by the late Jay Forrester of the MIT Sloan School of Management, who founded the field of systems dynamics to describe economic behavior and advance management education. Forrester recognized that systems thinking could, and should, be taught to students starting at an early age. Dr. Tracy Benson, the President and CEO of the Waters Center for Systems Thinking and one of the international leaders in the field of systems thinking education, is helping to implement Forrester’s vision. The Waters Center provides training in habits, strategies, and tools of systems thinking to educators and entrepreneurs around the world.
A recent longitudinal study conducted by the Waters Center explored the benefits of systems thinking in schools. The study found that systems thinking helped students connect their learning to real-world problems, improve their decision-making, and consider the unintended consequences of their choices. Likewise, a framework for K-12 Science Education developed by the National Academy of Sciences recommends the incorporation of concepts such as “stability and change” and “systems models” into the science syllabus. The framework, which informs state-level educational decisions, draws on the most recent scientific research on the best ways for students to learn science. However, systems thinking has yet to become a backbone for a modern school curriculum.
My experience of elite sports supports that argument: without insight, “process” and “methodology” don’t hold much value. Insight is the first domino. It is the quality that the greatest coaches and strategists possess above everything else. They originally see the game, allowing them to perceive how winning happens in ways that others cannot. They are like poets and scientists in this respect: they apprehend the game more clearly and form a superior understanding. Often their insights are bound up with making surprising connections or seeing analogies that others miss. “The creative mind,” in Jacob Bronowski’s phrase, “is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses.”
Ironically, so much time is wasted studying the “motivational tactics” of great sports leaders (invariably personal and impossible to imitate), which entirely misses what’s actually inspiring and motivating about them: their gift of apprehension, the clarity of their insights, the freshness of their vision. A great coach might or might not be articulate, but they are certain to have a philosophical talent for seeing through to the essence of the game.
McGilchrist’s arguments have implications for how organizations that claim to pursue excellence – whether businesses, schools, universities or hospitals – should perceive and arrange themselves. He argues in favor of wide-ranging thinkers who have the imagination to apprehend what’s needed, and then the perspective to know which levers and methods are best suited to bringing the project to fruition. Instead of trying to turn life into a machine, adapt your thinking and approach to life.
The primacy of insight and perspective also explains why organizational charts – designed so that accountants can apportion salaries and bureaucrats can file “appraisals” – are not only often fantastical but counterproductive. By encouraging a delusion of mechanistic order, they cut against creativity and genuine collaboration.
“The idea of a Gestalt is central to this book,” McGilchrist writes, “by it I mean the form of a whole that cannot be reduced to parts without the loss of something essential to its nature.” This idea is also highly relevant to team sports. A team must and can only be a collective and living whole. The whole is always different from the sum of its parts. That is true even in sports that (superficially) appear to be a series of independent events, such as cricket and baseball, as well as sports that have intrinsic flow, such as football and rugby. (It is a myth, as the cliché has it, that cricket is “a team game played by individuals”. It is, in fact, an individual game played by teams.)
McGilchrist attacks the notion that a collective endeavor can be chopped up, the elements polished separately, and then subsequently reassembled into a superior whole. He sees it as inappropriate in the human sphere. Indeed, it isn’t even true for machines. Russell Ackoff, the American systems thinker, asked his students to imagine a lecture hall filled with the best component parts drawn from every car manufacturer (the best brakes, the best suspension and so on). If all the best bits were then assembled, would it create the best single car? Of course not. The way a car fits together is, to a significant degree, the majority of what a car manufacturer does.
McGilchrist puts it like this: “I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things’.” In this context, I don’t think McGilchrist is using “relationships” to mean “how people get along with one another socially”. He means “how they relate to each other fundamentally in the creation of the whole”. This connects with the point made by Juanma Lillo – the mentor of Manchester City’s manager, Pep Guardiola, and who is now assistant manager at the football club – when he warned against criticising players without appreciating the context: “My mentality is interaction and relation. If you say, ‘Let’s evaluate the right-back,’ I say, ‘But who is alongside him? Who is in front of him? Nearest to him?’” (Lillo also said, “You can’t take an arm of Rafael Nadal and train it separately.”)
Of course, everyone wants to believe that success can be turned into a system – because a system can be copied and profitably “scaled up”. But there are no systems that can deliver success without intelligent steering by good thinkers. A good process can filter out errors (which is very useful), but it cannot yield insights.
Further, and this theme runs throughout the book, insight, and creativity can only be controlled and willed up to a certain point (even among people who have the talent). Believing there is a complete process for creativity is fundamentally anti-creative. “Brainstorming is practically the antithesis of creativity,” McGilchrist argues, reassuring if you feel looming despair every time someone picks up a marker pen in front of a whiteboard and says, “let’s brainstorm”.
In the UK, the supposed panacea of good management has proved to be a chimera. The country has been training managers in the discipline of managing for decades, but very little good has come of it.
If one looks at the public and private sector one sees more bureaucracy, greater intensification of work in which fewer people have to cope with downsized operations to deliver greater shareholder value, while the public sector is not improving in spite of huge cash injections and the UK falls behind Germany, the US and France in productivity.
According to the National Audit Office, the public sector in the UK spent £7 billion on consultancy in the past three years to little effect.
Management itself has become the problem. The reason for the failure is complex. In a nutshell, it is because the UK has been following the wrong way of doing things and constantly trying to get it right. But as the systems and management theorist Russell Ackoff said: "The righter we do the wrong thing, the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right."
The wrong thing managers have been doing is central planning, a command-and-control management model reminiscent of the Soviet Union. On top of this essential wrongness are a host of service companies and consultancies from IT to PR who reinforce the model with their own additions and refinements.
Russ Ackoff Systems Lecture His lecture on systems thinking 1975 A must-see video! A lecture was given by a young-ish Russ Ackoff. Covers many topics. It's copied from a VHS tape, so some areas have tracking issues. Keep watching, it will clear up.
It’s not an accident that data is the bedrock of the Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom (DIKW) pyramid made famous by Russell Ackoff in 1989. That expresses the shared conviction that data are the basic foundation on which all knowledge is built.
Except that’s not how data and knowledge work. It’s not even that there’s a more fundamental layer beneath data. Rather, the very shape of the pyramid reinforces a paradigm that has outlived its purpose. A pyramid is too stable, too linear, and way too one-way in its direction. It’s an Industrial Age model in which raw materials—data—are refined and transformed into a usable product.
In an age in which data is increasing exponentially, and our new technology, especially machine learning, can’t get enough of it, we need to flip the pyramid. Then we need to thoroughly rethink what data is, the context we want to use it in, and how to get the most value from it.
In the old DIKW pyramid, the line between data and information is actually a warehouse—another remnant of the Industrial Age. Data warehouses have served businesses’ predictable needs since the 1950s when the modern idea of data became prevalent in business.
Under this old definition, data are atomic elements of knowledge, siloed according to the department and application that developed them and tagged with metadata that reflected how that data was anticipated to be useful. The value extracted from them after they were delivered was likely to be forever lost
How Dynamic Conservatism Leads to Diversity Dodges
Aware of the ways in which organizations defend themselves against change that threatens their social structures, philosopher and social theorist Donald Schön noted that organizations will “fight like mad to stay the same.”5 Schön introduced the concept of dynamic conservatism to explain seemingly irrational responses by organizations to change and uncertainty, noting that great ideas that can reshape an industry or organization are almost always resisted because they upset the social hierarchy within the system. Systems thinker Russell Ackoff, a friend and colleague of Schön’s, was fond of saying that managers in organizations were rewarded for maintaining the status quo.
Schön further hypothesized that organizations resist change in proportion to its magnitude. Thus, it can be predicted that an organization that undertakes a major change, like hiring many more Black executives, will energetically resist those efforts with multiple defenses. Schön’s concept of dynamic conservatism argues that organizations make token changes in order to ward off substantive ones. This argument is especially relevant today — and the basis of the dodges that we delineate below. Here we seek to show how dynamic conservatism manifests by examining four ways that organizations avoid making substantive improvements or commitments to executive diversity — the recruitment, retention, mentoring, career development, pay equity, and promotion of Black people in senior positions.
The average lifespan of a public corporation recently dropped to only nine years. Change and digital disruption have dramatically transformed the nature of competitive advantage. The rules of business today bear little resemblance to those which Michael Porter shared in his seminal book, “Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.”
Digital today is not simply about digitizing the things you already do. Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani put it this way in their forthcoming book, "Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future" "With product lifetimes shortening, organizations are recognizing they can’t sustain a differentiated position by focusing narrowly on products and services.” Digital transformation, therefore, is about creating whole new business models. Businesses that succeed here can reimagine their corporate future and transform their basis of competition
“Managers do not solve problems,” the late University of Pennsylvania systems theorist Russell Ackoff famously said, “they manage messes.” Messes emerge because it is difficult to decipher the interconnections between and among business units and the external environment. And messes are difficult to manage because it is hard to save what is valuable without causing damage.
The systems thinker’s first task is to understand the nature of the interconnections. Take, for example, rapid and frequent changes in technology. These have implications for an organization’s human-resources policies—who should be hired, how they should be trained and managed, etc. Technological change also forces the organization to evaluate its structure and work practices: Should it have a flatter or steeper hierarchy? Should employees be given substantial autonomy? And so on.
The systems thinker’s second task is to match distinct business processes to activity within the company and to set policy directives on how every unit and activity initiates and responds to change.
The systems thinker aims to see the forest as well as the trees, looking beyond the first-order effects of changes to anticipate the size and magnitude of subsequent opportunities and constraints. He then designs a response system so that if it were to fail, it would do so in noncritical ways before failing in catastrophic ones—the engineering principle of “leak-before-break.”
The systems thinker is acutely aware that feedback loops mean that success begets success and failure begets failure. The 1980 IBM-Microsoft agreement illustrates this principle. That year, IBM asked Bill Gates and his fledgling startup, Microsoft, to develop an operating system for IBM’s new personal computer. The first part of the deal that Gates structured was standard: IBM would have to pay Microsoft a development fee of $200,000 and as much as $500,000 for incremental development work. The second part of the deal is noteworthy for Gates’s recognition of feedback effects. He gave IBM the rights to use the Microsoft operating system and several related products for no additional fees, on the condition that Microsoft had exclusive rights to license the system and related software to other manufacturers.
Why did Gates introduce this second element? In their book, The Business of Platforms, MIT’s Michael A. Cusumano, University of Surrey’s Annabelle Gawer, and Harvard’s David B. Yoffie note that Gates was aware of a growing “clone” industry and calculated that exclusive licensing could be very valuable if the market for personal computers took off. And indeed it did: an entire ecosystem of hardware and software developers emerged during the 1980s and ’90s centered around Microsoft’s operating system, which drove the company’s revenues from $16 million in 1981 to $19 billion by 1999.
The systems thinker is acutely aware that feedback loops mean that success begets success and failure begets failure. The 1980 IBM-Microsoft agreement illustrates this principle. That year, IBM asked Bill Gates and his fledgling startup, Microsoft, to develop an operating system for IBM’s new personal computer. The first part of the deal that Gates structured was standard: IBM would have to pay Microsoft a development fee of $200,000 and as much as $500,000 for incremental development work. The second part of the deal is noteworthy for Gates’s recognition of feedback effects. He gave IBM the rights to use the Microsoft operating system and several related products for no additional fees, on the condition that Microsoft had exclusive rights to license the system and related software to other manufacturers.
Why did Gates introduce this second element? In their book, The Business of Platforms, MIT’s Michael A. Cusumano, University of Surrey’s Annabelle Gawer, and Harvard’s David B. Yoffie note that Gates was aware of a growing “clone” industry and calculated that exclusive licensing could be very valuable if the market for personal computers took off. And indeed, it did: an entire ecosystem of hardware and software developers emerged during the 1980s and ’90s centered around Microsoft’s operating system, which drove the company’s revenues from $16 million in 1981 to $19 billion by 1999.
We live in a world whose complexity grows by the nano-second. And yet, few have been taught the full complement of skills necessary to make sense of and thereby cope with a complex, messy world. And yet, our very survival hinges on it.
Because they’re all highly interdependent, and thereby interrelated, we could start with any of the critical skills. But since the kind of knowledge necessary to deal with a complex, messy world is fundamental, Philosophy is a natural starting point. Further, if any Philosophic system is especially suited for dealing with complexity, it’s the Philosophical School of Pragmatism. Its essence is best captured in terms of a brief definition of what it regards as the Truth, especially how to obtain it. While the definition is important in itself, it’s made even greater by the unparalleled insights it offers into the nature of complexity.
In brief, “Truth is that which Makes an Ethical and Spiritual difference in the Quality of Our Lives.” Thus, unlike other Philosophic systems for producing knowledge, according to Pragmatism, Epistemology, Ethics, Spirituality, and Aesthetics are not only interrelated, but inseparable. In short, Truth does not consist of facts and abstract propositions alone.
Epistemology is the systematic means by which produce and thereby secure Formal Knowledge. Ethics is the means by which we know what is Right Ethically and what we need to do in order to achieve it. Spirituality is the feelings deep inside of us by which we know that there is more to the Human condition than our bodies and Pure Thought alone. The Quality of Life is a stand-in for Aesthetics, that is, what is Harmonious and thereby Pleasing. Finally, the little word “Makes” means that Truth does not consist of a set of published articles and books, but a carefully crafted set of Ethical Actions designed to Right a set of Wrongs. In other words, Ethical Actions are not only the means by which Truth is achieved, but its very essence.
The true importance of the Pragmatist approach is that it leads to a deeper understanding of complex, messy systems. The late, great distinguished Social System’s educator and scientist par excellence, Russell L. Ackoff appropriated the word “Mess” to stand for a whole system of problems that were so highly interconnected, and thus constantly changing in direct response to one another, such that one couldn’t take any of the so-called individual problems out of the Mess and attempt to analyze them on their own without doing irreparable damage to the fundamental nature of the problems and the entire Mess of which they were a part. In other words, looking at problems in isolation violated one of the key properties of every Mess, all of the vital interactions between the problems. Indeed, interactions are the key attributes of every Mess.
(As an aside, Ackoff was the first PhD students of my Philosophical mentor at UC Berkeley, C. West Churchman. In turn, Churchman was a student of E.A. Singer who was one of William James’ best students, one of the principal founders of Pragmatism. Thus, if intellectually speaking, Singer is my Grandfather, then James is my Great Grandfather, a fact of which I couldn’t be prouder. My link with Pragmatism is direct indeed.)
There’s another important consideration that makes things both more complex and interesting. The late, distinguished UC Berkeley Architectural planner Horst Rittel introduced the concept of Wicked Problems. Wicked Problems are the complete opposite of Tame Problems, of which Exercises are the prime examples. Their endless attraction is due to the fact that students and teachers alike prefer them because they’re Bounded and Well-Structured, thus lowering the anxiety associated with uncertainty. “X+5=11, find X” is a typical example. Thus, following the classic rules of Algebra, everyone is expected to get the single right answer, X=6. Furthermore, once solved, Tame Problems stay solved forever. Not so with Wicked Problems. No single academic discipline or profession has the final say in either their definition or solution. Furthermore, they are constantly changing.
Putting the two together, the result is Wicked Messes. All of the key problems with which we are faced—the Economy, Extreme Divisiveness and Polarization, Homelessness, Women’s Rights, etc.–are Wicked Messes. But things are even more complicated. Because they continually impact one another, all Wicked Messes are thereby part of the larger Wicked Mess known as The World Mess. In short, all of the known problems of Society and the World are deeply interconnected.
In this way, Pragmatism not only forces us to grapple with, but challenges us constantly to surmount the immense turmoil associated with the most complex entities imaginable. Psychology is thereby a key element with regard to our ability to cope with complexity. In short, one’s state of mind is a key component of every Wicked Mess. Not only does one need to able to tolerate high degrees of uncertainty, but to appreciate the widest possible diversity of Expert Opinion. Indeed, one needs to seek it out. Without it, one is doomed to falling prey to one of the most damaging of all errors, the Error of the Third Kind: “Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely.” Before one makes the critical decision as to which problem one ought to solve, multiple perspectives are absolutely essential.
Since crises are an ever-present feature of today’s world, Crisis Management (CM) is also an integral component of coping with Wicked Messes. Indeed, every Wicked Mess both contains and leads to enumerable crises.
CM is fundamentally Thinking the Unthinkable and then doing everything in one’s power to prevent it from happening. But since crises both happen to and are the result of the faulty and irresponsible—read “Unethical”–behavior of organizations, specialized knowledge of organizations is also a critical ingredient in coping with complexity. In order to be as prepared as possible, it not only necessitates understanding what organizations need to do Before, During, and After crises, but especially why too many are resistant to CM.
The set of activities that encompass Before are first of all the consideration of as many Worst-Case Scenarios as possible. Namely, how crises can and will occur in the most unimaginable ways and at the most inopportune times. Second, that none of the known types of crises should be discounted. Rather, the key question is, “What is the form that say Product Tampering or Domestic Terrorism can and will assume such that it’s either our fault or does insurmountable damage to us?” Third, how do we identify and overcome the barriers that stand in the way to making CM a key priority for our organization? Fourth, how do we form and maintain Crisis Management Teams (CMTs) throughout our entire organization that will meet regularly, assess our susceptibility to crises, and address if our preparations are adequate?
During involves enacting all of one’s Before preparations. And After involves the most brutal, no-holds- bared assessment of what one did right versus wrong so that one is better prepared for future crises. In other words, learning is key.
One of the most critical of all activities is coming to terms with the different forms and sources of Denial.
In a previous blog[i], I examined a series of arguments/claims that have been constantly bandied about for not getting vaccinated for Covid 19. It quickly became clear that as bad as the individual arguments/claims were, they were made even worse by the disturbing fact that they reinforced one another in the most insidious of ways. Not only are they highly interactive, but they naturally grouped together into tight clusters thereby bolstering one another even more.
While they are by far one of the most destressing outcomes of Covid 19, the situation is made worse by the fact they are a direct reflection of the sad state of Reason in general. The greatest downfall is that they impede our collective ability to tackle the important issues facing us. In short, they are Denial writ large.
To recall, first and foremost is the Hoax Cluster, namely that Virus is not real, and therefore, not deserving of any, let alone serious, attention. It’s supported by the false assertion that the numbers of people affected are too small to worry about. It’s further reinforced by the Conspiracy/Paranoia Cluster. Namely, the Virus has been intentionally fomented by the Government so that by surreptitiously placing microchips in the vaccines, not only can it track our every whereabouts and thoughts at all times, but control them and thereby take away our precious freedoms and liberties. The I Know Best Cluster is the false belief that I and I alone know better than anyone else everything there is to know about myself. Therefore, I and no one else has the right to make important decisions pertaining to my body. The Invulnerability Cluster is the mistaken belief that “If in the highly improbable case that the Virus is real, I’m immune to it.” The Product Defect Cluster is the unfounded claim that the Vaccine, not the Virus, is the true culprit since it’s responsible for causing the Virus in the first place. In other words, it completely reverses the correct order of things. Furthermore, the vaccine has not been tested enough to ensure its complete safety. Therefore, there are no valid reasons for our trusting it.
The major point is that all of the Clusters are part of every Wicked Mess. Whatever the particular case, there are always voices claiming that it’s a Hoax, and so on. For this reason alone, Critical Thinking—surfacing and rebutting fallacious arguments/claims–is one of the most important skills in dealing with Wicked Messes.
Coping with Wicked Messes calls for all the fortitude and skills we can muster. Nothing less will do.
