Ackoff Center Weblog

Systems Thinking - BBC open2.net

Making a difference through Systems Practice

Systems thinking leads to Systems Practice. Systems Thinking has emerged in response to the increasing complexity we now face in the world. In this section, some of the pioneers of systems thinking share their experiences and insights. We also show how contemporary systems practitioners have come to grips with some messy situations.

To access the website and listen to Peter Checkland, Russell Ackoff and Sir Geoffrey Vickers, please click on the link: Systems Practice-- Managing Complexity.

Summit for the Future

May 3-5, 2006
Club of Amsterdam

The Club of Amsterdam presents its global "Summit for the Future", which will take place in Amsterdam on May 3-5, 2006. This second Summit will bring together international Thought Leaders to discuss significant, global challenges and opportunities. This time the speakers will focus on the subject of risk and the role of risk in innovation and global growth.

The topics are Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, Trade - Asia, Healthcare, Corporate Governance , Innovation as Risk Taking, Knowledge based Risk Management, Values and Spirituality, Cross-Cultural Competence and Creative Leadership.

To read more about this event, please click on the link: Summit for the Future

Digital Learning and Videogames

At the Ackoff Center for Advancement of Stystems Approaches (ACASA), this research concerns how to use videogames and virtual world simulation to promote systems thinking in users. As complexity increases in organizations and in daily life, there is a greater need for interventions to help promote better systems thinking. Traditional teaching methods pose a number of pedagogical dilemmas and run counter to the expectations for learning in the new generation of employees. We are experimenting with artificial societies, transport into narrative worlds, poetics, animation, and alternative media and videogame designs in the context of several sponsored research projects. The game/training simulator creation platform we are building is a multi-agent, artificial society simulator capable of modeling individual agents’ physiology, stress, emotion, and course of action decision making that in turn leads to the emergence of macro-behaviors and punctuated equilibria. We are researching authoring tools that will help people to use our lessons learned while designing their own systems training and analysis games.

• Edutainment and games for training -- overview 
• Dr. Silverman's Remarks to Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center (WRMDC)
  
• Serious Games;
  
• HEART-SENSE: a game with virtual personas for heart attack symptom training (NIH/NLM/NHAAP);
  
• Terrorism and asymmetric conflict gaming; developing realistic synthetic personas for training simulators (Pentagon/DMSO/IMC);
  
• Agent Based Identity Repertoire (ABIR)

Consumer Idealized Design: Involving Consumers in The Product Development Process

by Susan Ciccantelli and Jason Magidson

A product or service is designed effectively if it provides consumers with what they want, rather than merely removing what they do not want. But determining what consumers need or will want is an effort that does not often meet with success. In fact, suppliers' beliefs about consumers' wants have led to more product failures than successes. The main reason for this is not hard to understand: Consumers' needs and desires are elusive because consumers themselves generally have not consciously formulated what they are or how to fulfill them.

Even when consumers are aware of what they want and are willing to reveal it, their wants are likely to be conditioned by what is available. And when the product or service available is basically unsatisfying to them, they are unlikely to reveal startling new desires or concepts. At best, the typical ways in which
consumers are involved in product design-focus groups, surveys and questionnaires-tend to elicit mostly information about what they do not want, rather than startling new insights about what they really want or need. This is due in part to the fact that people often attempt to provide answers that they think the inquirer wants, rather than probe for their own preferences.

So the search continues, and product developers continue to seek ways to help consumers (1) become more aware of what they need or want, and (2) reveal these wants as accurately as possible. One such way, developed by Russell L. Ackoff, is a process called Consumer Idealized Design (Consumer Design).

To read this article, click on the link: Consumer Idealized Design: Involving Consumers in The Product Development Process.

Journal of Research Practice

JRP is an international refereed journal with a transdisciplinary focus, available in the open access mode, i.e., available free of charge to the readers. The journal is supported by a consortium of institutions drawn from different parts of the world. It is published electronically by the International Consortium for the Advancement in Academic Publication (ICAAP).

You are invited to join this global initiative to develop research practice and promote research education around the world.

To read more about this journal, click on the link: Journal of Research Practice.