Systems Wisdom, Pioneers in Translational Consulting

In 2013, a group of practitioners, including some of the Ackoff’s former students and colleagues came together to create Systems Wisdom, an organization with the objective of going beyond traditional boundaries of various disciplines and consulting practices.   They shared the following concerns and opportunities:

Frustrations with traditional consulting approaches: i.e., if what is offered by traditional organizations is so good why has the average life expectancy of organizations decreased from 75 years in 1937 to 11.5 years today?

Limitations by those who believe one methodology or consulting approach fits all customer/client requirements; and who adhere to one methodology even within the systems and design thinking community.

Inadequate integration of systems and design thinking particularly when confronted with complexity – a topic “everyone” talks about.

Constraint of 2^nd generation design in which experts study users but remain the designers.

From this emerged the pioneering work on “translational consulting” in which similar to translational medicine there is focus on the unique organizational DNA of a client, on capturing lessons learned, and where an intervention must be individually designed, implemented and controlled/tracked. Another objective was to bring a greater degree of realism to computational thinking to make it more effective for teaching decision making processes.

To read more go here: Systems Wisdom