Systems thinking -- Inquiry across philosophy, science, arts, and humanities [Russ Ackoff, ISSS 1998 Plenary Session, July 20/98]

These notes are a rough transcription, prepared as each individual presenter and/or commentator spoke at the ISSS 1998 conference. Gaps and errors have likely occurred. For more accurate citations, please consult the original presenters. These notes have been contributed to the ISSS by David Ing, of the IBM Advanced Business Institute (sabi@systemicbusiness.org).

Recently heard a parable about system thinkers:

• Traveling with a priest and consultant (system thinker).
• Found to be guilty, drew lots for who would be beheaded.
• Priest: wanted to be in guillotine facing upward, to see god.
• Blade stopped an inch from his neck, released.
• Executive: agnostic, but wanted the same thing.
• Same thing happened.
• System thinker was an atheist, said he wanted the same thing.
• Looked up and said "I think I see the problem, and know how to fix it".

• A whole ...
• Defining function ...
• Newton had to postulate God to make it work.

• 3-step process.
• Doctrine of reductionism.
• Lose the essential properties of the systems, and
• lose the essential properties of the parts.

People from Britain drive on the wrong side of the road.

• Can get all the automobiles on the road, can't explain.
• Why was the first American car 6-passenger?

• Data: symbols
• Information: data processed to be useful
• Knowledge: what is contained in instruction
• Two separate meanings:
1. awareness -- I know you're there.
2. skill -- which is contained in instruction
• Answers in why?
• Wisdom: Drucker: Doing this right, versus doing the right thing.
• Effectiveness versus efficiency.
• e.g. health care system has been under revision for 30 years:
• It's a sickness care system, a disability care system, not a health care system.
• Oriented towards sickness: 40% of people in U.K. and 35% in U.S. of people in hospital are there because of something that was done to them before.
• The righter you do the wrong thing, the wronger you become.
• Have an obligation to look at things in life.

1. ... as a part of a larger system ...
2. Explain the behaviour of the larger containing system.
3. Disaggregate the whole ...

There are no disciplinary problems.

• Labels have nothing to do with the content of the problem.
• U. Penn. professors working with urban black development.
• Young man came to meeting with news about 83-year old woman who organized geriatric set.
• Women had organized a daycare center.
• Got the university to open a free clinic in the neighbourhood.
• Checked up, okay, had heart attack on the third floor.
• First medical: if had more doctors ...
• Second, economics: Lots of doctors, but no way to pay ....
• Then, architecture: elevators.
• Finally, social worker: had a son, husband deserted, successful son in the suburbs

Headaches not solved by brain surgery: put a pill in the stomach, instead.

Marketing executive who sees a problem tried to manipulate his variables, which is rarely effective.

C.P. Snow: The two cultures:

• The humanist
• The technocratic
• Both are sides of the same thing.

• Humanity is the search for differences in things that appear to be same
• Science is the search for similarities in things that appear to be the same.

• In Renaissance, divided life into work, play, learning and inspiring.
• Thus, divided institutions into 4 categories.
• e.g. church, golf course ...
• Have destroyed the potentiality for creating a high quality of life, because there's no way to integrate the four.

• Suppose we give you your income now for life, what would you do tomorrow?
• If the answer is different from what your doing today, then there's something wrong.

• Clerks at the bottom have no learning, no satisfaction.

Need a multiversity, not a university.

• Most of what we learn is by doing, not by being taught.
• The teacher learns the most at a university.

• You've had to learn a lot over the past decades. You're a good learner. It's too bad you're not a good teacher.

Questions:

• Value is a measure of preference.
• The probability that you will select one choice is a measure of preference.
• Value to the system is three-dimensional:
1. For the system as whole.
2. For the other parts.
3. For the part itself.
• At each of three levels, there a conflicting objectives.

• Russ's restatement: What is the basic ethical value by which we make choices?
• Freedom of choice subject to a constraint.
• Legitimate freedom of choice increases the choices of an individual while not decreasing the choices of others.