Mia Jovanova and Chioma Woko: 2021 Ackoff Fellowships

University of Pennsylvania

• September 14, 2021
• vol 68 issue 5

Mia Jovanova

Chioma Woko

Annenberg graduate students Mia Jovanova and Chioma Woko have received the Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship Award for 2021 from the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. This is the seventh year in a row, and the thirteenth year overall, those Annenberg students have been fellowship recipients.

The research fellowship, now in its fourteenth year, is named in honor of Russell Ackoff, professor emeritus of management science, whose work was dedicated to furthering the understanding of human behavior in organizations. Made possible by an endowment from the Anheuser-Busch Charitable Trust, the fellowships are awarded to University of Pennsylvania doctoral students who are pursuing research in decision making under risk and uncertainty.

Ms. Jovanova will pursue a project called Brains, Social Networks and Susceptibility to Risky Health Behavior. 

Health behaviors are often not independent, and one important form of influence includes conversations among peers. As such, considerable effort has been invested to understand how the brain responds to interpersonal influences, and how social network characteristics relate to risky decision-making in groups, separately. Yet, little is known about how brains and social networks interact.

In the current project, Ms. Jovanova is part of a large team of researchers at Penn, Columbia, UNC, and Dartmouth, seeking to understand the interplay between brains and social networks. In her part of the project, Ms. Jovanova seeks to understand how differences in young adults’ brains relate to how they respond to social influences on drinking outside the lab.

To ask these questions, the team followed ten existing social groups of college students, across two campuses. Ms. Jovanova combines three different types of data: social network assessments, brain scans, and daily mobile phone surveys. The researchers characterized the ten social networks at baseline, 6 months, and 12 month periods. A subset of participants from each group was scanned and reported their alcohol-related conversations and drinking, twice a day over 28 days. Ms. Jovanova examines differences in brain activity in two brain systems, the reward, and mentalizing systems. These systems are associated with how individuals process rewards, such as social approval from peers, and make sense of peers’ mental states, among other cognitive processes. Ms. Jovanova relates differences in these neural responses to day-to-day drinking following pro-alcohol conversations. Further, she investigates how these links vary based on how connected people are to others within their social group.

Mia Jovanova and Chioma Woko: 2021 Ackoff Fellowships

The avatars of the strategist This one ubiquitous job actually has four distinct roles

“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 right 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 avatars of the strategist

To solve big issues like climate change, we need to reframe our problems

World Economic Forum

July 19, 2021

Most of our social and global problems are multi-causal. The problem-solving scholar Russell L. Ackoff memorably used the term “messes” to describe real-world problems. But people often dislike complexity, preferring neat stories with a single, easily identifiable villain.

Take the case of gun deaths in the US. Advocates for gun ownership often use the “mental health” argument that guns don’t kill people, people do. On the other hand, people who dislike guns often see it as an access problem and call for a ban on all guns. Arguably, both of these framings are as simplistic as they are infeasible.

Contrast this with the approach described by the economist Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times column. He uses the car industry to reframe the gun debate. We fight automobile accidents through a broad suite of different interventions, which allows us to keep using our cars but in a safer way.

This approach calls for a portfolio of reasonable regulations that recognizes the political fact that many Americans want to keep their guns. This is a far stretch from the binary "access-or-mental-health" framing and, in our opinion, much more likely to create results.

 

To solve big issues like climate change, we need to reframe our problems

How Leaders Can Solve the Learning Dilemma

A new MIT SMR Executive Guide explores opportunities for organizations to embrace the future of workplace learning.

Ally MacDonald March 01, 2021

 

In 1991, Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris wrote, “Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn.”1 Fast-forward 30 years and swap in “the 2020s,” and these words likely ring true for many executives today.

To be clear, learning is as high a priority as ever for corporate leaders. Before the pandemic, learning and development (L&D) efforts aimed at reskilling and upskilling workforces ranked among global CEOs’ top concerns. COVID-19 has accelerated existing trends in remote work and automation and shined a spotlight on digital skills gaps in organizations.

Despite concern at the top and significant investments in training each year, many organizations are failing to meet employees’ learning needs.2 Gallup data shows that only 4 in 10 employees strongly agree that they have opportunities at work to learn and grow.3

So where do things go wrong?

For Argyris, the learning dilemma demonstrated that organizations make two critical mistakes: First, they define learning too narrowly, and second, they fail to reflect on how internal behaviors and thought patterns block effective learning.

Over the past year, L&D teams have had to pivot quickly and reshuffle priorities in order to meet the needs of remote workforces, from moving in-person learning models online to thinking beyond a focus on technical skills to the behavioral “human skills” at the core of virtual communication and collaboration. Along the way, companies are finding that some traditional systems of learning must shift to meet new needs.

How Leaders Can Solve the Learning Dilemma

Mike Jackson In Conversation With Jean Boulton

The Complexity in the Social World series of interviews (and YouTube Playlist) follows on from the seminar we organized in March 2021. The aim of this series is to capture some of the foundational thinkers in conversation around how to apply complexity thinking to the social world, the world of managers, economists, change agents, and societies. In this way, some of these foundational thinkers, many starting their work in the 1980s, are represented and their differing perspectives and different foci of application are available in one place.

Mike Jackson In Conversation With Jean Boulton

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Diversity & Universality in Systems Thinking

The field of systems thinking may be in the midst of a sea change event—a 'fourth wave' predicated on the search to identify universal patterns that unify the diversity of frameworks and methods in the field as well as, perhaps, knowledge and disciplines in general. It is critically important that the field of systems thinking resolve what Bateson called a 'double bind' between a diversity of methods and the universality of patterns that underlies them. Furthermore, the best candidate theories, grounded in evidence, must be vetted and reviewed. JoST's Special Issue on Diversity and Unity will frame the debate. Thus, we issue a Call for Papers—an open and invited call for papers responding to the paper:

Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. (2021) The Four Waves of Systems Thinking. In, Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking, (Eds) Cabrera, D., Cabrera, L. and Midgley, G. Routledge. London, UK. 

• We are inviting notable experts on the topic as well as providing an open, general call for response papers.
• Submissions can be of any length up to 8000 words.
• Using this form, you must notify us that you intend to submit a paper by May 30, 2021 (this takes less than one minute).
• Rolling submission closes August 30, 2021. 
• To Submit to our Special Issue access the target paper here and submit your paper here.

Please feel free to share this notice and the image below on social media or with your department, organization, and/or advanced graduate students. 

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Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships

The 2021-2022 call for proposals is open!  The deadline to apply is March 22, 2021.

Since 2006, the Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship program of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center has provided grants to University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. students who are pursuing research in decision making under risk and uncertainty.  The research fellowships are named in honor of an endowment provided to the Wharton School by the Anheuser-Busch Charitable Trust.  Professor Emeritus of Management Science, Russell Ackoff’s work was dedicated to furthering our understanding of human behavior in organizations.

For 2021, the program will provide a small number of grants to doctoral students conducting research directly related to the Risk Center’s current research agenda. Potential topics to receive funding should align thematically with one of our five research labs: (1) disaster risk management, (2) business, climate, and the environment, (3) risk communication & decision-making, (4) behavioral science & technology, and (5) political risk.  We encourage students to visit the lab websites to better understand current priority topics.

The fellowship provides up to $4,000 for research support. Proposals can reflect a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.  The funds may be used only for data collection, surveys, and other direct research expenses.

Award recipients are required to write at least one blog post for the Risk Center’s blog, Lab Notes, based on their research. Blog posts should generally be 1,000-2,000 words in length and be written for an educated, lay audience. Award recipients will also be invited to participate in the Center’s junior research seminar, designed to provide early-stage scholars with the opportunity to present their research and receive feedback on their work.

To apply: Please submit your proposal and the application form to Carol Heller at [email protected].

Recent recipients of the Wharton Risk Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships:

The DIKUW hierarchy

Before we go any further, we want to make one thing clear: this article will not tell you what to do with your data. That would be impossible; we don't know any particulars about your facility or what it is you're trying to achieve. Instead, we'll show you how to use the DIKUW hierarchy: Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, Wisdom.

The DIKUW is a framework that we've found invaluable for thinking about data and generating useful insights. It isn't a prescriptive guide but an outline of a typical data journey. It will help you see where you are in your data journey and what to expect. It will also help you understand the limitation of data.

Systems theorist Russell Ackoff outlined the DIKUW hierarchy in his paper "From Data to Wisdom" in 1989 and described it as a 5-step process that we all go through as individuals and institutions, transforming data into wisdom.

Cleanroom monitoring: How to make the most of your data

How to clean up the innovation mess

By Urko Wood  –  Contributing Writer

Jan 5, 2021, 4:05am EST

According to the late Wharton Professor Russell Ackoff, attempting to innovate without first validating customer demand is a "mess."

Indeed, any situation that has “arguable issue definition and arguable solutions” is a mess.

If you do not confirm that a customer need is important and unsatisfied before generating ideas, then you are creating a mess. First, identify your customers’ unmet needs and then solve their problems.

Never get bogged down testing ideas again

Many organizations get bogged down testing a lot of bad ideas. I know one organization that abandoned its entire stage-gate new product development process because the frontend seemed hopelessly bogged down. This is totally unnecessary and should never happen.

Yet it happens because organizations mistakenly think that “innovation begins with an idea.” Not true. New product development starts with an idea, but innovation begins with an insight. Every fully formed new product idea is comprised of 1) an insight into the customers’ unmet needs, and 2) a novel way to address that unmet need better.

If you want to turn innovation into a repeatable business process, discover your customers’ unmet needs first and then solve their problems. A well-defined customer need is half-satisfied.

The challenge is that most organizations don’t know how to identify their target customers’ unmet needs. Consequently, they waste time and resources testing a lot of bad ideas. Contrary to popular opinion, any idea that does not address an important unsatisfied need is a “bad” idea. To test ideas that address unimportant needs is to major in the minors. And to test (and focus on) ideas that address needs that are already well-satisfied by the market may give you competitive parity if your customers are unsatisfied with your solution, but it won’t give you a competitive advantage since other competitors are already satisfying the need. Only those needs that your target market deems to be important and unsatisfied are opportunities for innovation and growth and worthy of pursuit.

 

What if you could identify and rank the biggest opportunities for innovation and growth in your market from the customers’ point of view, independent of any solutions, with statistical validity before generating any ideas? What if you knew where to focus and what to do to address unmet needs in a repeatable manner? Could that change the game for you?

Savvy organizations discover the unmet needs in their markets first and then generate ideas to address them. This changes the brainstorming mantra to, “There is no such thing as a bad idea as long as it addresses a known unmet need.” It also changes innovation from a game of chance into a repeatable business process.

Reveal needs. Create value. Drive growth.

How to clean up the innovation mess

Is it time to return to the original 2020 plan? Or does 2021 need a fundamentally different game plan than envisioned for 2020?

"In this process, Gildersleeve says “take stock of what you were able to accomplish in 2020 and how the business has changed, and then invest in continued digital transformation to support these changes.”

Hinchcliffe finds in his research that “many CIOs are now just getting their arms around 2021, given the constant, ongoing operational issues of this year. It is time in this author's opinion for CIOs to heed the advice of futurist Russell Ackoff who said that “planning should consist of the design of a desirable future and the invention of ways to bring that future about. As well, planning should be continuous.”

2021 CIO Goals: What Forces Will Shape 2021?