August 29, 2023
Setting priorities through “systems thinking” at the SDG Summit
While every bit of progress on the SDGs by 2030 matters, easy fixes may not be the best place to focus Member States’ efforts. A systems-thinking approach is required to determine where to prioritize action to accelerate progress across the Goals.
Posted by ACASA on August 29, 2023 at 10:45 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
July 30, 2023
How Leaders Can Avoid The Complacency Trap
Complacency often manifests as an error of omission. Errors of omission are errors of inaction — the failure to make a decision or to respond to a situation. Research shows that humans have a rather significant omission bias, as we favor errors of inaction to errors of action. Errors of inaction are viewed as less blameworthy, less intentional, and less immoral than errors of commission. As a case in point, a client of mine recently declined to address an early warning sign of mistrust out of a concern that addressing it would make things worse. To compound this bias, errors of inaction are often not even noticed. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer management professor, once wrote:
"Errors of omission are horses of a different color. Decisions not to do something are seldom made a matter of record. Therefore, it is at best very difficult to become aware subsequently of the fact that a mistake was made, let alone who made it."
Omission bias influences leaders to hold back, even when intuition tells them something is amiss. Even in retrospect, it's difficult to spot an error of omission. Without a feedback loop, leaders don't just fail to act once; they fail to act time and time again until they are labeled complacent. The best leaders view errors of omission and commission as equally disruptive and detrimental.
How Leaders Can Avoid The Complacency Trap
Posted by ACASA on July 30, 2023 at 10:35 PM in Interesting | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 30, 2023
Human-Centered Systems Thinking
A holistic approach to problem-solving starts with people.
People are at the heart of every complex human system--but they’re often the most overlooked. Effective problem solvers today know how to visualize the larger dynamics of the system while staying grounded in the needs of people. In this course, you’ll learn to combine the analytical tools of systems thinking with the creative mindsets of human-centered design to make sense of complex systems challenges. Explore mapping tools to identify the right places to focus, surface insights about your stakeholders, and pick the most impactful solutions to experiment with so you can go beyond the obvious and design lasting solutions.
Course Outcomes
- Gain techniques for mapping complex systems and identifying the root causes of a problem.
- Establish a shared view of the system and reframe problems from different perspectives to uncover new solutions.
- Find the right problems to solve and pick the best solutions to experiment with.
- Deepen your understanding of your organizational systems by taking an iterative approach to testing solutions and gaining insights.
Posted by ACASA on June 30, 2023 at 10:27 PM in Systems Articles | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 31, 2023
What is systems thinking?
Posted by ACASA on May 31, 2023 at 07:45 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 28, 2023
An Introduction to the Systems Approach
By H. William Dettmer
There is no question that in our age there is a good deal of turmoil about the manner in
which society is run. Probably at no point in the history of man has there been so much
discussion about the rights and wrongs of the policy makers...[Citizens have] begun to
suspect that the people who make the major decisions that affect our lives don’t know
what they are doing... They don’t know what they are doing simply because they have
no adequate basis to judge the effects of their decisions. To many it must seem that we
live in an age of moronic decision making.
—C. West Churchman
The Systems Approach (Introduction) [1:vi]
Sounds like Churchman is talking about us today, doesn’t it? The preceding quotation comes from the
introduction to his seminal book on systems thinking, The Systems Approach, written in 1968. That’s sad
testimony to the fact that few decision makers in the world have learned much about complex systems in
the last 37 years. In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, “Man will occasionally stumble over the
truth, but usually he just picks himself up and continues on.”
We’ve been “continuing on” for four decades. It’s time to go back and revisit that truth we stumbled over
in 1968. We can snicker at the fact that life seemed so much simpler then. The world has “gotten smaller” as travel,
communication, the information age, and the Internet have combined to connect people and societies as never be-
fore. As economies have evolved from regional to national to transnational to global, our organizations have grown
in size and complexity. It is nearly impossible for the people running them to fully understand what goes on
“where the rubber meets the road” in nations, governments, and companies.
Analysis versus Synthesis
Since the turn of the century (the 20th century, that is), the accepted approach to dealing with increasing com-
plexity is to try to reduce it into manageable “bites” and address them in isolation. This approach is referred to as
analysis. We analyze a complex situation or issue by trying to break it down into component pieces and consider
each in isolation from the others. This kind of thinking has its roots in analytic geometry, where one basic axiom is
that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. Think about that for a moment. The underlying assumption behind
this conclusion is that all of the parts are essentially independent of one another.
But although this mathematical thinking might apply to bricks and other inanimate objects, it fails when ap-
plied to dynamic, homeostatic, or cybernetic systems [2:28-31]—which generally include any organic systems, or
those where human beings have a role. And unfortunately such systems are the ones that exert the most influence
on our lives. We see the failure of the analytical approach all the time: The Rohr Corporation’s Riverside, Califor-
nia, plant recorded a 55% increase in profits in 1996. Great news, if all you focus on is short-term profits. When
you look at the larger system, you see the reason for that increase is better “efficiency” (meaning cost cutting) tem-
porarily had a greater impact than the 3% decline in sales. Or, as the corporate treasurer enthusiastically observed,
“Costs have come down quicker than our revenue has decreased.” [3:G-1]. (I’m sure the 3,500 people laid off at
Riverside by Rohr in the preceding few years are immensely gratified to know that!) The Rohr story is a classic
example of self delusion by analytical thinking.
If an analytical approach to management is counter-productive, what should we be doing instead? A holistic,
or whole system approach is considerably better suited to the kinds of complex organizations we usually encounter
today. What’s the difference between an analytical and a systems approach? The systems approach represents syn-
thesis—thinking with an integrated perspective about the whole enterprise.
An Introduction to the Systems Approach
Posted by ACASA on April 28, 2023 at 08:08 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 29, 2023
Evading the Success Trap
By Gordon Institute of Business Science
Most companies accept that innovation is essential to ensuring long-term sustainability, but most struggle with the practicalities of integrating innovation into their ‘business-as-usual’ mantra.
One of the many paradoxes of business is that success exposes a company to the risk of ultimate irrelevance. Companies that are conscious of this risk avoid the success trap by integrating disruption or innovation into their business models. The trouble is that it is fiendishly difficult to do, and many fail to get it right. As always, understanding the problem is the first step in solving it.
It’s easy to see why success can act as a trap. While business success is typically built on the back of innovation, the reality is that when it all pays off, the focus shifts from thinking out of the box to creating an institution – the focus shifts to putting in place the processes to maximise profits and minimise costs. Conceptually, the business’ mindset moves from how to get ahead to how to stay ahead. The two can seem mutually exclusive, especially if, as is almost inevitable, the company structures itself in traditional ways.
To cite one glaring example: the typical corporate structure of business units focused on meeting targets can work well in the short term, but it actually militates against innovation. This article aims to understand why that should be so and how to put a company into a stronger position to build innovation into its “business-as-usual” structure and mindset.
First, one needs to understand how innovation works. Then, based on this basic understanding, we can begin to extrapolate some principles for how a company could integrate innovation into the way it does things. At the same time, it will become clear how traditional ways of doing business are often inimical to the development of innovations.
Workplace design
Steve Johnson’s insight about the English coffee house as the epitome of a space that nurtures design suggests how inhospitable to innovation the industrial design of many workplaces is. By contrast, the “cool” workplace of the archetypal technology company, with its chill rooms and campus atmosphere, starts to make more sense. Such companies depend on par excellence in fostering innovation.
But for more conventional companies, all is not lost – Johnson cites the work of researcher Kevin Dunbar, who filmed how work was done in several science labs around the world. On analysing the videos, he found that the most important ideas did not emerge from the classic lab environment. Almost all of the breakthrough ideas emanated from the weekly lab conferences. Everybody got together to share their latest findings and thoughts – often, it was sharing mistakes or frustrations that sparked the innovative thought. Johnson calls this environment in which different people from different backgrounds and interests come together to share what they are doing during a “liquid network”.
So it might not be necessary to spring for acid-green beanbags and a ping-pong table – the good old-fashioned conference table with everybody around it regularly will work just as well. It’s all about creating a semi-chaotic environment that allows people to see how seemingly disparate things could collide and create that spark of something new.
Organisational design
Equally important is organisational design. The typical organisational design tends to create silos (business units, functions like marketing, sales or IT), making it very hard to create the kind of physical environment, as described above, in which a wide variety of ideas, data, and interests can fruitfully collide. The silos (inadvertently) created by typical organisational designs also prevent people from seeing the company as a whole. Useful insight comes from Dr. Russell Ackoff, an organisational theorist: “In any system, when one improves the performance of the parts taken separately, the performance of the whole does not necessarily improve and frequently gets worse.”
Great innovations in marketing, for example, do not necessarily translate into innovation that makes the company more competitive or serves its customers better. One should never forget that most of the important business processes are horizontal, and that way of thinking needs to permeate the organisational design.
It’s no exaggeration that this problem of silos and the negative impact they have on all aspects of a company’s performance, not just its ability to innovate, is one of the perennial business challenges. The often-heard desire for as flat a corporate structure as possible is essentially a wish to solve the silo problem.
One way to encourage employees to see the company as a whole, as a codependent and interdependent system, could be to look at how performance is measured. Too often, performance measures mirror the organisational silos or the crude bottom line, but careful design could link them to common goals and objectives. This approach could nudge people to think about running the business better and how to change it for future relevance.
Corporate culture
Culture is a notoriously slippery concept and difficult to change, but it is a potent force in any organisation. A company that wants to integrate innovation into its DNA certainly needs to take steps to promote a culture of reinvention. As discussed in the previous point, rethinking how performance is measured will lay the groundwork.
Another important foundation for a culture of reinvention would be to change how failure is viewed. As Steve Johnson argued, it is often when people discuss their failures with colleagues that connections are made that spark innovation. One of the things that people have always noticed about the business culture in the United States, compared with that in the United Kingdom or South Africa, is the diametrically opposed way that failure is viewed. Typically, in the United States, failure is seen as a learning experience that makes entrepreneurs better able to succeed; here, it is something to be swept under the carpet. In the corporate environment, in particular, failure is very much a dirty word. In contrast, in the United States, it can be seen as identifying an individual prepared to try new things. (I suppose the quantum of failures would be important!)
To read the rest of the article click on the following link:
Posted by ACASA on March 29, 2023 at 11:37 PM in blog post | Permalink | Comments (0)
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.
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.
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.
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)