If you'd like to participate in the In2:InThinking Network's December 'Ongoing Discussion' on the subject of Russ Ackoff and his life and work, you'd be very welcome. The conference call is hosted by Bill Bellows who knew Russ extremely well and he will be joined by a number of good friends of Russ. Click here for details.
In the weeks before he died, we were working with Russ to publish the 40 or so remaining Management 'f-Laws' that he wrote with Herb Addison. We published the first collection in 2007 and had agreed to publish the remainder alongside an essay about Russ's take on Systems Thinking. With typical punctiliousness, Russ had insisted that we drop a political reference which might, if read in a very poor light, have suggested that he endorsed a particular political party.
We've decided to go ahead with publication of the new book, in part because of what people like Steven Brant are saying about Russ Ackoff and Systems Thinking:
"The world lost a very great man this past Thursday. So great, in fact, that the only person I can compare him to is Einstein. And that's because this man - Russell L. Ackoff, Professor Emeritus of The Wharton School - transformed the world of problem solving just as Albert Einstein transformed he world of science. Russ was my friend and mentor for the last 10 years and was 90 years old when he passed away from complications resulting from hip replacement surgery. His official obituary is here.
Why I compare Russ Ackoff to Albert Einstein
Before Einstein and his fellow physicists made their discoveries early in the 20th Century, the scientific world assumed that our universe was - essentially - a "giant clock." This mechanical view of the universe was made obsolete by the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, through which the universe was redefined as being an interrelated and interconnected series of waves... of patterns of energy. (I'm using short-hand language here.) The bottom line: computers could not exist without Quantum Mechanics, because its principles make possible how computer chips work.Mechanical view of the universe... no computers. Quantum Mechanics... computers (and a whole lot more). It's that simple.
Well, before Russell Ackoff and his fellow organizational development theorists made their discoveries in the period following WWII, the management world assumed that solving the problem of how to make organizations work better required using Analysis: breaking the problem (the organization) up into its component parts... fixing those parts (including "those people") that were broken... and putting the organization back together, with the expectation that it would then work. This was also a "giant clock" philosophy.
This mechanical view of problem-solving was made obsolete by the development of Systems Thinking, through which making organizations work better was redefined in recognition of the role played by the design of the entire system. Synthesis - the thinking method involving seeing how different elements in a system interact with each other - replaced Analysis as the method of developing breakthrough operational improvements (otherwise known as Innovation).
Innovation comes from looking at whether an entire system can be transformed, not if certain parts of a system can be improved. You don't get from a car to an airplane by just looking at how the car's engine works.
The work of Russ Ackoff and his colleagues codified what had previously been done by people who were innovators naturally (inventors, for example). Previously, how these people thought was not a formally recognized thinking discipline."
"...the end to Systems Thinking's long period of isolation in an intellectual wilderness may come because the United States appears to be headed for the kind of crisis that has brought about large-scale change in the past.Read the rest of this obituary here.As I said above, America is tearing itself apart.
As Frank Rich reports in today's New York Times, the Republican Party is progressing steadily down a "road to purity" (led by people such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck). This will further destroy the already nearly non-existent partnership that exists between the two sides of "the house of America". And as President Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I don't care what the DOW does or what the GDP numbers are in the next quarter. (And please note: BusinessWeek doesn't appear to care about GDP numbers that much anymore either. See "The GDP Mirage" in the latest issue.)
It's the health of our socio-political fabric that determines whether a nation avoids a catastrophic crisis or not. And right now, that health is dropping rapidly.
So, the stage is being set for when America will finally be ready for "a new way". I only hope that the Systems Thinking community (and its cousins - by virtue of the Performance Model of The UN Global Compact - in the corporate social responsibility community) manage to get organized well enough to offer themselves as the "new way" when the time comes. Because if they don't then some "other new way" will take its place. (Yes, I'm talking about, Sarah Palin. I know she sees this crisis coming. But she has a very different take on what the response to the crisis should be. After all, she's an "end of days" person.)
But there's another hurdle that Systems Thinking will have to overcome. And that is that - at its very core - it is a discipline that involves thinking differently. As the name suggests, it involves thinking in systems... frequently and continuously... which is not how many of us have been taught to think."
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