By Myles Suer
February 28, 2023
On the Use of Models in Corporate Planning’ by Russell Ackoff- and Why Militaries Should Read this.
When the military thinks “problem”, what is the very next word associated? 100% of the time, it is “solution.” We correlate a “problem-solution” formulaic arrangement through our particular doctrinal, linear-causal, systematic manner of pairing a managerial decision-making methodology (called JPP, MDMP, MCPP, and a host of cloned equivalents) with a mechanistic, Taylorism inspired and Newtonian styled frames (paradigms) for interpreting reality. But is there more than “Imagine goal, find problem preventing said goal (ends), identify solution, direct ways and means to solve problem, achieve predetermined goal, rinse, repeat?”
Okay, I just tossed out a bunch of concepts that either cause readers to say “what the hell is that”, or for some, a fierce crossing of the arms and a “harumph, that is not true! Military doctrine is the best. Have you read the new FM 3–0?” If you are still reading, rest assured, I can provide links and sources to these important concepts. But let’s get to Ackoff and this nice, short article that is pound-for-pound, one of the most powerful articles I use in design education. Ackoff delivers in a mere 8 pages some mind-blowing content, all conveyed in non-academically dense sentences. This article should be read by everyone involved in military education, particularly at the cadet and basic levels in my opinion- as this would help confront the complete dominance of our ancient Greek logic that posits “individual plus designed action leads to planned result”, or “it is better to do anything rather than nothing”- the basis for our legends and lore of heroic action, our basis for leadership, and our basis for “ends-ways-means is the best framework for appreciating complex reality and simplifying it so we can observe, orient, decide, and act faster and better than a rival”- hence the Boydian priests that overlap with the High Priests of von Clausewitz (they share common ground in ancient Greek logics).
On the Use of Models in Corporate Planning’ by Russell Ackoff- and Why Militaries Should Read this.
Posted by ACASA on February 28, 2023 at 08:35 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 29, 2023
Herman Wrice’s War on Drugs
The late Philadelphia activist showed how communities can fight back against a plague.
The Social Order
Whether it was the sweltering heat, the rarity of the visit, or good advertising from the White House, the West Philadelphia Community Center was exuberant on a July day in 1990, when it welcomed President George H. W. Bush to speak about the devastating effects of crack cocaine. The president described how some neighborhoods had become “a war zone of despair.” He spoke with special pride of the city’s fight against addiction. He singled out children in the crowd who, he said, had “the right idea—no crack in Philadelphia except for the one in the Liberty Bell.” And he told the story of 11-year-old James, who used to work as a lookout for drug dealers because he was afraid to ask his crack-addicted mother for money. Someone helped James break out of the drug trade—a “towering mountain of a man who started a whole movement by declaring war on a crack house with a sledgehammer,” whom James now called “Dad.” This man, Bush said, was “the John Wayne of Philadelphia”: a white-hat cowboy who had spent the last three years leading hundreds of community marches, protests, and crack-house evictions in a battle against drugs in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods.
That man was Herman Wrice. As a boy, he lived in a tiny village without running water or electricity, but he would emerge as a crucial figure in one of America’s great cities. In the 1960s, he led a community organization that helped provide employment assistance to blacks yearning to improve their lot. In the 1980s, as the crack crisis swept Philadelphia, Wrice became known nationwide for shutting down crack houses, leading community marches to reclaim neighborhood blocks, and pioneering guerilla tactics in a grassroots war on drugs. “You are getting your job done right here,” Bush said to Wrice and his compatriots, “in efforts like the all-night bonfire vigil one rainy night when 300 of you in white hard hats closed down drug action on Indiana Avenue. When you lit that first bonfire, you were lighting more than just one flame against the cold: setting up a beacon of hope against evil, a symbol to other communities in despair.”
Though his name is still remembered in some quarters, Wrice has faded from American memory since his death in 2000. Before then, he had traveled from city to city to teach communities what he had learned in fighting the drug crisis. He was a quintessential figure of the 1990s urban renaissance, when mayors, community organizers, and neighborhoods looked at two decades of disorder and decay and said, “Enough.” Such problems have now returned: drugs kill 100,000 Americans annually; violent crime and disorder have surged in cities across the country. Communities eager for solutions have something to learn from Herman Wrice’s story.
Born in 1939, Wrice spent his early years in Crites, West Virginia, a 90-person, 25-house mining village. He and his sister, Dolores, were left there in their grandparents’ care—their father was serving in World War II, while their mother took a factory job in Indianapolis. Crites was not easy to live in, particularly for a black boy. When Wrice’s integrated school bus was forcibly resegregated, he and the other black children rode to school in the back of a coal truck.
Posted by ACASA on January 29, 2023 at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 28, 2022
Seeing Your Company as a System
Whole-systems Design
Much-needed guidance on making companies more employee-centered, adaptive, and capable.
by Andrea Gabor
Any effort to cultivate a systems orientation could profitably begin with the work of the late Russell Ackoff, one of the field’s pioneers. Not surprisingly for a man who warned against organizational silos and fragmentation, Ackoff rejected narrow specialization in his own career. He studied architecture and philosophy and pioneered operations research before joining the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, where he taught systems sciences and management. After leaving Wharton in 1986, Ackoff worked as an independent consultant until his death in October 2009.
Ackoff drew a clear distinction between the machine age, in which companies could assume relative stability and seek optimum solutions to discrete problems, and the systems age, beginning after World War II, a time of growing global and technological complexity. Organizations would henceforth have to deal with “sets of interacting problems” and give up the quixotic search for simple solutions that could be applied consistently. The key challenge, Ackoff said, would be designing systems that would learn and adapt. In a talk he frequently gave on “the second industrial revolution,” he said, “Experience is not the best teacher; it is not even a good teacher. It is too slow, too imprecise, and too ambiguous.” Organizations would have to learn and adapt through experimentation, which he said “is faster, more precise, and less ambiguous. We have to design systems which are managed experimentally, as opposed to experientially.” To accomplish this, he laid out a method of interactive planning, which involved an “idealized design of the organization” — a technologically feasible future that reflected how key stakeholders would redesign and rebuild a system if it were suddenly destroyed.
Seeing Your Company as a System
Posted by ACASA on December 28, 2022 at 11:05 PM in Classics | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 30, 2022
In a data-led world, intuition still matters
A new book argues that the best decision-makers combine good data with sound judgment.
by Daniel Akst
Decisions Over Decimals: Striking the Balance between Intuition and Information
by Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, and Oded Netzer (Wiley, 2022)
For as long as there have been decisions, people have used facts (lately known as data) to make them, along with reason and intuition. Nowadays, though, data often seems to be making decisions for us. Just as ‘analytics’ has changed the face of sports, business data prompts computers to order products, cut prices, or take other actions that once required human thought and intervention.
But data needs people just as much as people need data. Business leaders must decide whether to launch a new product line, expand into a new continent, buy or sell a business, or change a venerable logo. So how can managers use the torrent of data available to them to make the best decisions? That is the timely subject of Decisions Over Decimals, a concise guide to decision-making in the age of analytics written by Christopher Frank, Paul Magnone, and Oded Netzer, a trio of business veterans associated with Columbia University (as well as American Express, Google, and Amazon, respectively).
“The challenge in today’s world is not the lack of information but the judgment to use it,” they write. Data-based decision-making is unavoidable but comes with risks: “Data and numbers tend to provide the comfortable feeling of accuracy and certainty, but they rarely tell us the full story. Numbers alone can never provide a perfect solution or answer, and they will never immunize decision-makers from faltering.”
What business leaders need, the authors argue, are techniques for combining good data with sound judgment. Over the years, they’ve developed an approach called Quantitative Intuition (QI) to help executives make informed choices. And they are convinced that QI, oxymoronic as it may sound, can be learned. “Combining quantitative information with intuition—human judgment developed through experience and close observation—is indispensable.”
In its broadest outlines, QI doesn’t look different from what any sensible person would do to make a decision. But as the authors walk us through their process chapter by chapter, various valuable insights, large and small, emerge.
For example, they cite the late organizational theorist Russell Ackoff’s observation that “we fail more often because we solve the wrong problem than because we get the wrong solution to the right problem.” They point out that you don’t know what data you need until you properly frame what you’re trying to decide. The data can only take you so far on this essential question because you have a view of the broader business landscape, including, of course, the complexity of your own business. “Don’t expect the data to provide both the questions and the answers,” the authors warn. “It is your responsibility to home in on the essential question and then combine data with intuition to identify the answers.”
Because the authors consider clarifying the problem significantly, they believe it’s worth senior management investing time to do so upfront, saving time and error for everyone later. “Why?” questions, asked of subordinates in a near childlike fashion, can help in problem-defining. Why do you want to conduct such a study? Oh, to know customers better. Great, but why do we want to know them better just now? And so forth, leading eventually to the real issue at stake.
In a data-led world, intuition still matters
Posted by ACASA on November 30, 2022 at 06:50 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
October 31, 2022
A Collaborative Business Culture Is a Must-Have for Transformational Change
In my discussions with CIOs over the last several years, they have repeatedly stressed the importance of considering people and processes before technology. The transformational change CIOs are leading needs to fit with their organizations.
After reading "Smarter Collaboration" by Heidi Gardner and Ivan Matviak (the book reaches shelves on Nov. 1), I think collaborative business culture is a must-have for organizations needing transformation change. This culture should, as a goal, put IT into a team that is creating the corporate future. For this reason, I recommend "Smarter Collaboration" to business leaders and CIOs. With a culture of collaboration, everything is easier.
Why Collaborate?
Gardner and Matviak start their book by asserting that competition moves faster in the digital era. Speed can be a competitive edge or deterrent. The authors argue firms that succeed at transformation figure out how to collaborate across silos and build teams with complementary skills. And this is increasingly the essence of competitive advantage. While technology and the ability to “sense that the snow is melting at the edge” still matters — without collaboration, some organizations can have a "Kodak moment" where the middle of the organization rebels against corporate strategy.
For this reason, businesses today need contributors that can build networks across boundaries and then invoke those networks to deliver value to their companies. The author’s research shows collaboration accelerates innovation, increases customer satisfaction and enhances employee engagement. And these result in higher revenues and profits, greater market share, improved efficiency, accelerated growth and improved transparency and risk management. To prove this point, they provide case studies from multiple industries.
Importantly, smart collaboration also impacts employee engagement. Today, 30% of employees worldwide and 67% in the US say they are not engaged. Expectedly, working remotely tends to increase worker isolation. Given this, CIO David Seidl said in a recent #CIOChat that “today, we're focused on how we build connections and communities for new hires and maintain it for everyone.”
This matters, the authors say, because today’s business uncertainty and complexity are best tackled by a diverse team with complementary talents. The reference to complexity is similar to Professor Russell Ackoff, who suggested, “our environments have become larger, more complex, and less predictable — in short more turbulent.” (“Creating the Corporate Future,” Wiley Press, page 4).
A Collaborative Business Culture Is a Must-Have for Transformational Change
Posted by ACASA on October 31, 2022 at 12:58 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 30, 2022
Researchers Develop Innovative Approaches to Graduate Education and Workforce Training
Initiatives Are Supported by $463K in Grants from the National Science Foundation

08/16/2022
By Edwin L. Aguirre
A team of researchers headed by Electrical and Computer Engineering Prof. Kavitha Chandra is developing interdisciplinary programs that target graduate education and future workforce training in using digital technologies for automotive and manufacturing industries. The initiatives are supported by two grants totaling nearly $463,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“Future work in science and engineering fields demands that learners acquire not only strong disciplinary knowledge, but also design skills and systems-thinking skills that can be adapted and applied to solving emerging, complex problems in society,” says Chandra, who is the associate dean for undergraduate programs at the Francis College of Engineering.
“At the same time, this need also opens opportunities for women and students of color, traditionally underrepresented in science and engineering, to explore a broader range of research and career pathways that better identify with their interests and values,” she says.
Researchers Develop Innovative Approaches to Graduate Education and Workforce Training
Posted by ACASA on August 30, 2022 at 11:27 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 31, 2022
Susanne Kaiser on DDD, Wardley Mapping, & Team Topologies
"Wes Reisz: Great. There's so many things that are in software. What made you decide to bring these three things together to kind of a story?
Susanne Kaiser: Yes. So for me, the combination of Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design and team topologies evolved naturally over time, but it was at its core driven by system thinking. So, Dr. Russell Ackoff, one of the pioneers of the system thinking movement, he stated that a system is more than the sum of its parts. It's a product of their interaction. So the way parts fit together, that determines the performance of system, not on how they perform taken separately. So, and when we are building systems in general, we are faced with the challenges of building the right thing and building the thing right. Right? And building the right thing addresses effectiveness, and addresses questions such as how aligned is our solution to the users and business needs. Are we creating value for our customers? Have we understood the problem and do we share a common understanding and building the thing right?
Focuses on efficiencies, for example, efficiency of engineering practices, and it's not only crucial to generate value, but also being able to deliver that value. How fast can we deliver changes, and how fast and easy can we make a change effective and adapt to new circumstances. So, the one doesn't go without the other, but as Dr. Russell Ackoff pointed out doing the wrong thing right is not nearly as good as doing the right thing wrong. So, by considering the whole, and having effectiveness and efficiency in mind to build the right thing right, that we need a kind of like holistic perspective to build adaptive systems. One approach out of many is combining these three perspectives of business strategy with Wardley Mapping, software architecture, and design was Domain-Driven Design, and team organization was team topologies. So, in order to build and design and evolve adaptive socio-technical systems that are optimized for fast flow of change."
Susanne Kaiser on DDD, Wardley Mapping, & Team Topologies
Posted by ACASA on July 31, 2022 at 10:20 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
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].
Posted by ACASA on June 30, 2022 at 11:53 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
Primary school students enjoy discovering interdependencies in the world around them.
gettyWe 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.
Posted by ACASA on June 30, 2022 at 11:19 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 31, 2022
Success is the result of creative thinking and intuition, not scientific systems.
By Ed Smith
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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”.
Posted by ACASA on May 31, 2022 at 04:51 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)