16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Decision Making, Heuristics, Human Systems, Humans, Implicit Knowledge, Life, problem solving, Science vs Art, Social Context, strategy
Life is not a sanitized laboratory experiment. It’s rather a messy ebb and flow that makes scientific precision a futile pursuit. The scientific method has its rightful place in the universe, but human affairs are more artful than scientific.
17 Monday Jun 2013
Posted in business, Crisis, design thinking
Tags
Creative Tension, Crisis, integrative thinking, problem solving, Roger Martin, Short Term vs. Long term
They say mistakes are key to learning. Having had my share, I couldn’t agree more. But I would say while mistakes are great learning experiences, crises exercise a unique mental capacity for (wicked) problem solving: integrative thinking.
Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as the “ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each”.
17 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in complexity, society, technology
Tags
Recently a Washington Post article explored the proliferation of obfuscatory language in our culture (see http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-02-06/lifestyle/37026527_1_initiatives-internet-web-site). An excerpt follows below:
“Before the Internet, obfuscatory language was mostly limited to the small world of the interoffice memo, where everyone conspired to be as vague and process-driven as possible — promising nothing concrete while sounding businesslike. Today, however, terms such as “optimize,” “prioritize,” “initiative,” “parameter,” “implement” and “effectuate” have become common parlance on the Web, used unabashedly in endlessly intriguing combinations. There are hundreds of instances of “prioritize the implementation of,” “implement the prioritization of,” “effectuate the implementation of,” etc. The expression “implementation of prioritized initiatives” alone appears on the Internet 2,100 times, more often than some of Pablo Neruda’s lesser-known love poems.”
I would single out as the biggest culprits in promoting useless jargon the big consulting companies and business schools. The big consulting houses sell in theory the same services but try to contrast and compare their offerings and you can get easily lost in a myriad of catch-phrases.
Alongside the business Illuminati, the IT revolution also resulted in an endless list of buzzwords to describe what is essentially “process efficiency”. It’s really funny when IT is sold as a capability to drive strategy, and in general to support or even replace highly creative activities that only humans can perform.
Which brings me to my law of the constancy of the human predicament: as more technology and know-how becomes available, we manage to somehow stay ahead of the simplicity curve so our confusion remains constant relative to progress. And that means there will always be prophets and oracles, i.e. consultants in modern day parlance, as a natural extension of our emotional self.
Everything has changed and nothing’s changed.
So if we were to eliminate all the buzzwords that the consulting and IT industries continue to produce, what would be left? I would venture to say: “problem solving common sense”. As long as there are humans, there will always be problems, and common sense will always be in short supply. Which explains why buzzwords will also always be around: to compensate for the lack of common sense, for which the demand is and will remain bigger than the supply.
17 Sunday Feb 2013
Posted in complexity, problem solving
Tags
causality, complexity, creative thinking, critical thinking, models, problem solving, relationships
I have been dealing with ill defined problems for quite some time. In this post, I will try to capture the essence of my approach to wicked problems in a five step process.
1. ELEMENTS – THE BUILDING BLOCKS: mentally walk through or discuss scenarios associated with the problem and note key elements that pertain to the problem space as they emerge. At this point, elements can be loosely defined: it is better to have a larger list of elements that are vaguely defined than a smaller list of clearly defined elements.
2. LOGICAL CLARITY: conceptually strengthen the problem’s elements so as to reduce logical ambiguity. Explore and resolve overlaps, hierarchy. Categorize as much as possible. Reduce the original list of elements to the smallest possible set.
3. CAUSAL RELATIONSHIPS: walk through problem scenarios again, this time exploring the causal relationships between elements. This represents the “static” structural characterization of the problem.
4. MODEL: architect a model to capture the problem’s dynamics (the main difference between a static and dynamic characterization of the problem is the time dimension that exposes the evolution of the problem’s elements and their relationships). Validate the model by exercising a few “what-ifs” derived from the original scenarios. Based on the type of model that fits, categorize the problem type if possible.
5. EXPLORE: apply initial questions pertaining to the problem to the model and explore non-obvious insights. Exploring implications should increase the understanding of the problem.
In summary, the approach to wicked problem solving is: ELEMENTS – RELATIONSHIPS – DYNAMICS. The more complex the problem, the more sophisticated the model, and more iterations likely required.
A key trick is that the process may not be followed sequentially; that is, one could jump between the various steps as necessary (for example, while working on the model in step #4, one may need to jump back to step #2 to additionally clarify a particular element, or to step #3 to re-evaluate a particular relationship).
Finally, the entire process requires a diversity of mental skills: creative thinking for scenario walk-through; critical thinking for logical strengthening; design thinking for model architecture.
24 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in consulting, knowledge, learning, management, problem solving, strategy
Russell Ackoff is likely the Albert Einstein of management. The reasoning is this: he created what is in essence a Generalized Ontology of Problem Solving just as Einstein created the Generalized Theory of Relativity.
By comparison, most management gurus, consulting principals and executives only master a special case problem solving heuristic. Lower level managers and consultants are only able to reproduce a priori defined special case problem solving algorithms.
Professor John Geto of Krasnow Institute of Advanced Study cautions that without an ontology we are liable to continually reinvent new terms for existing knowledge, making it difficult to achieve a strong foundation on which to build. Management in general and management consulting in particular can in large part be paraphrased as problem solving common sense; yet, the generalized problem solving ontology carefully crafted by the genius of Ackoff has not been widely adopted. In a hierarchy management masters Ackoff’s generalized and universal thinking pedestal is permanent and situated on significantly higher ground than the altars at which most of us currently worship: innovation and Clayton Christiansen, Design Thinking and Roger Martin, Gary Hamel and Management 2.0, etc.
As in the popular “Matrix” movies, Ackoff is “the one”. But, it appears we may need a Morpheus character like advocate within the management discipline. And we need to overcome our latest infatuation with progress only possible in teams; the Theory of General Relativity could not have been a crowd sourced innovation on Facebook. Sometimes it takes “the one”.
The art and science of the possible 