Peter Senge on Russ Ackoff

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"For me Russ was an incisive, lifelong critic of the modern organizational form. He saw its limitations and argued for radical redesign. He advocated for major re-visioning and processes of change that started with helping people see what they truly valued and where they truly wanted to get - and then working backwards to see what it would take to get there. Anything less would simply lead to naive incrementalism, where 90% of what had been would be preserved while people tinkered around the edges with change that would never amount to "too much change." Russ was not worried about too much change."

Read Peter Senge's full and generous tribute to Russ Ackoff.

Have a look at Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: Russ's last collection of management f-laws, published this month by Triarchy Press.

Delivering Public Services that Work

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Next week comes the launch of a new book about Systems Thinking in the Public Sector?

"Why?" you cry, "John Seddon's last one was lengthy and did the job just fine".

Well, as you may recall, a man called David Walker at the UK Audit Commission (he is the Managing Director of Shouting at People who don't Worship the Audit Commission, or something like that) got upset when John Seddon said the Commission should be abolished because it cost a fortune and made things worse.

He said, more or less explicitly, that Seddon couldn't be trusted because he was a consultant with a product to sell and because his 'nostrums' had no evidence to back them up.

So Seddon collected six case studies from public sector clients of his consulting firm (Vanguard) which show categorically that his approach does work. The case studies are in a nice little book called Delivering Public Services that Work (Volume 1). You may deduce from the Volume thing that there are more to come.

We've sent a copy to David Walker at the Audit Commission.

In the mean time, if you're new to John Seddon, there's a clip of him here talking about back office factories, targets and improving public services. Lovely stuff.