Courtesy of John Seddon's Beyond Command and Control and the Vanguard Method:

Russell Ackoff (1919-2009) was Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This was despite remaining ambivalent about educational institutions in general and business schools in particular, once saying that:

Business schools are high-security prisons of the mind– Ackoff quoted in Stern, 2009

The management pioneer Peter Drucker once wrote to Ackoff, saying that his early work:

saved me – as it saved countless others – from descending into mindless ‘model building’ – the disease that all but destroyed so many of the business schools.

Ackoff quoted in Miller, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) 09/11/09

He worked as a consultant (although he preferred to be known as an ‘educator’) in many industries, including a three-decade association with Anheuser-Busch, which makes Budweiser, among other beers, in which he helped the brewer achieve dominance in the US. According to an obituary published in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Ackoff also studied Anheuser-Busch’s marketing strategy and concluded that increasing advertising budgets had a minimal effect on sales. (Neither did the taste of the beer, he found through blind taste tests.) ‘This was incredibly valuable,’ says Bill Finnie, a former director of strategic planning for Anheuser-Busch who studied for his Ph.D. under Mr. Ackoff. ‘It gave Anheuser-Busch the confidence to maintain its marketing budget flat from 1961 to 1976. We quadrupled sales.’ According to Mr. Finnie, reduced marketing costs were passed on to consumers, making Budweiser more affordable compared to local brands that had dominated the market through the 1950s. During Mr. Ackoff’s more than 30 years of working with Anheuser-Busch, beginning in 1960, the company’s national market share increased to more than 40% from 7%.

Miller, WSJ 09/11/09

Ackoff’s systems thinking – ‘difficulties’ vs ‘messes’

Ackoff was an advocate of systems thinking because he thought it could deal with the messy complexities of interrelated real-world problems, rather than taking an oversimplified, reductionist view of the world. In his book ‘Redesigning the Future’ (1974), Ackoff discussed the differences between types of situations, some of which he described as ‘difficulties’ and others as ‘messes’. A difficulty is characterised by ‘broad agreement on the nature of the problem and by some understanding of what a solution would look like, and it is bounded in terms of the time and resources required for its resolution’. In contrast:

Messes are characterised by no clear agreement about precisely what the problem is and by uncertainty and ambiguity as to how improvements might be made, and they are unbounded in terms of the time and resources they could absorb, the scope of enquiry needed to understand and resolve them and the number of people that may need to be involved.

Chapman 2002

In general, traditional reductionist methods will suffice for dealing with ‘difficulties’ such as repairing a machine, choosing which card to play in a poker game, or spotting the errors in a contract. Ackoff argues that systems thinking, and in particular his form of ‘interactive planning’, is the best way to cope with the complexity inherent in messes (e.g., attempting to improve the performance of the UK police force or devising a new policy to reduce immigration). For Ackoff, an essential skill of a systems practitioner is the ability to deal with a system of problems and opportunities as a system, synthetically, as a whole.

Interactive planning

Ackoff also categorizes different ways of planning in an organization, contrasting his concept of ‘interactive planning’ with that of ‘reactive planning’ and ‘preactive planning’ (Ackoff 2001). Reactive planning stems from recognising deficiencies within an organisation and then devising projects to address them. This has two faults: it may remove waste, but it can replace it with something worse. Secondly, it treats parts of the organisation separately, despite performance being linked to how these parts interact as a whole in the organisation.

Preactive planning is a top-down approach that attempts to forecast the future. This is bound to fail, according to Ackoff, saying that:

Any prediction of the future ensures a poor outcome.

Ackoff et al, 2006, p4

Instead, ‘interactive planning’ is his alternative: interactive planners.

‘Plan backward from where they want to be to where they are now … In so doing, they prepare their organizations for success in the unknowable future.'

Formulating the mess, ‘dissolving’ problems, and the idealized design.

Instead of ‘solving’ a problem, Ackoff describes the need to ‘formulate the mess’ so that it can be ‘dissolved’:

The best thing that can be done to a problem is to dissolve it, to redesign the entity that has it or its environment to eliminate the problem.

Ackoff 1999

In his process of ‘idealized design’, formulating the mess helps participants to identify how the organisation would sow the seeds of its own destruction if it did not change its behaviour to adapt in a changing environment. It involves the preparation of a systems analysis (showing in detail how the company currently operates), an obstruction analysis (showing what would get in the way of further progress), reference projections (hypothetically projecting progress under current policy and anticipating any future changes in its operating environment) and a reference scenario (a description of how and why the organisation would destroy itself if the assumptions were made true, synthesising the previous stages). Then the organisation should engage in end-state planning, deciding how it would ideally be if it had free rein to be whatever it wanted. Following this, the organization analyzes the gaps between what was observed and what was projected in the reference scenario. The organisation then directs its attention to reducing the gaps between these two scenarios ‘collectively and interactively’ (Ackoff 2001). This leads into the first stage of ‘realization’: means planning. Means planning involves selecting the course of action and policies to be pursued to achieve the idealized redesign. Resource planning is the next thing to do. This step plans resources required (such as facilities, personnel, money, information, and knowledge), when and where they will be needed, and what to do if there are shortages. The design of the implementation determines who is to do what, when, and where. Finally, the design of the controls focuses on monitoring improvements, planning decisions, and determining whether they are producing the required results. Ackoff emphasizes that interactive planning is continuous, and therefore, these steps can occur simultaneously and interactively. No phase is ever completed, and all outputs are subject to subsequent revision. The plans are treated as:

At best, still photographs taken from a motion picture.

Ackoff 2001

During the ‘idealized design’ process, Ackoff instructs planners to be aware of certain constraints on the design. They must:

Assume that the organization being planned for was completely destroyed last night, but its environment remains unchanged. Then they try to design that organization with which they would replace the existing organization right now, if they were free to replace it with any organization they wanted, subject to only two constraints (technological feasibility and operational viability) and one requirement (an ability to learn and adapt rapidly and effectively).

Ackoff 2001

Technological feasibility means that the design cannot become a work of science fiction, but it does not preclude the discovery of new uses for technology. Operational viability means that the organisation must be designed to survive in the current environment, including compliance with today’s laws and regulations. Ackoff’s example is that while all-electronic voting in elections might not be desirable now, as it could be susceptible to computer hackers, it could become desirable in the future when voters can be more confident in the system's integrity (Ackoff et al., 2006, p. 9). Finally, the organisation needs to be able to learn over time and adapt to changing circumstances. It should, in fact, be frequently redesigned by internal and external stakeholders.

Ackoff’s requirement for constant redesign has a critical effect, making an idealized design not an ideal organization. As the system is subject to continuous improvement, it is:

Neither perfect nor utopian. The design produced should be that of the best ideal-seeking system of which its designers can currently conceive. (They may, and probably will, be able to conceive of a better one later.).

Ackoff 2001

In many ways, this is therefore a ‘thought experiment’ in the manner of those used as a device by moral philosophers to conceive of a better society (e.g., Rawls 1971). Such a thought experiment creates fertile grounds for emergent thinking. This may mean that the end result of the ‘idealized design’ exercise is something completely unexpected. In an example from the book ‘Idealized Design’, Ackoff describes how experimentation on the design of telephones at Bell Laboratories aimed at eradicating the number of wrong numbers dialled inadvertently invented touch-tone dialling, and in fact anticipated many of the other innovations in the telephone industry that followed (Ackoff et al 2006 p xl).

The use of Ackoff’s ‘interactive planning’ may be held up as a way of encouraging organizations to act more effectively at the system level (rather than the subsystem level). In support of this point, Ackoff comments in a section marked ‘Overcoming Today’s Crisis’ that:

The great power of idealized design is that it identifies a much broader set of possible solutions and opportunities to make changes in the larger system that will alleviate the symptoms in the part.

Ackoff 2006 p138

Aphorisms

Ackoff was a powerful communicator, using anecdotes and aphorisms (e.g., ‘a bureaucrat has power to say ‘no’ but none to say ‘yes’ ’) (Ackoff et al, 2007, p. 91) to convey his thinking. Others include:

An organisation that cannot accommodate nonconformity will not be able to retain creative people.

Stefan Stern, Financial Times 09/11/09

Organisations fail more often because of what they have not done than because of what they have done.

The less managers expect of their subordinates, the less they get.

A particular saying which has influenced the Vanguard Method is his statement about ‘doing the wrong thing righter’:

All of our problems arise out of doing the wrong thing righter. The more efficient you are at doing the wrong thing, the wronger you become. It is much better to do the right thing wronger than the wrong thing righter. If you do the right thing wrong and correct it, you get better.

Stern, 2009