Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today [Hardcover]

Russell L. Ackoff (Author), Jason Magidson (Author), Herbert J. Addison (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0131963635 | ISBN-13: 978-0131963634 | Publication Date: April 30, 2006 | Edition: 1

What's the best way to drive fundamental, transformative change within your organization? Envision your ideal solution: then, work backwards to where you are. It's called idealized design, and -- as executives in hundreds of organizations will testify -- it's one of the most powerful techniques you'll ever use. Authored by its legendary creator, Wharton Professor Emeritus Russell Ackoff, and leading practitioner Jason Magidson, Idealized Design covers every facet of this breakthrough methodology. You'll learn the fundamental differences between idealized design and traditional process re-engineering, and understand how idealized design eliminates many conventional obstacles to change. Start-to-finish techniques and examples drawn from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations will show you how to use idealized design to solve your own crisis of tomorrow...today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Idealized design is a great concept: in order to find the ideal solution to a business challenge, you envision the perfect solution, then work backward to the possible. The authors appear to have followed that concept, asking themselves what the ideal business book should include. A thorough explanation of the concept and convincing proof of its value in a variety of situations and organizations? Check. An inventory of the ideal environment for performing idealized design experiments? Check. Case studies? Check. The development of idealized design is largely credited to Ackoff, a management professor emeritus and author of 22 books who is praised in the foreword as "no doubt one of the greatest management innovators of our time." The progressive concepts described here are useful to companies undergoing a difficult transition or wanting to push themselves to the next level. More impressively, this volume ventures beyond the business realm to explore how idealized design can be applied to larger social issues, such as a national health care system or a new electoral system. Regardless of whether the reader agrees with the proposed designs, those examples expand the interest of this book beyond its traditional category and readership. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover

What's the best way to drive fundamental, transformative change within your organization? Envision your ideal solution: then, work backwards to where you are. It's called idealized design, and -- as executives in hundreds of organizations will testify -- it's one of the most powerful techniques you'll ever use. Authored by its legendary creator, Wharton Professor Emeritus Russell Ackoff, and leading practitioner Jason Magidson, Idealized Design covers every facet of this breakthrough methodology. You'll learn the fundamental differences between idealized design and traditional process re-engineering, and understand how idealized design eliminates many conventional obstacles to change. Start-to-finish techniques and examples drawn from hundreds of companies, non-profits, and government organizations will show you how to use idealized design to solve your own crisis of tomorrow...today.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Wharton School Publishing; 1 edition (April 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131963635
• ISBN-13: 978-0131963634
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #913,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting and likely helpful process for moving your organization into tomorrow, May 26, 2006

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today (Hardcover)

This is one of those books that I loved the first 2/3 of, but the last 1/3 is better off ignored. This book talks about a process that can get an organization into better competitive shape for the future by imagining the present as destroyed and we have to begin again with what we now know but with none of the inertia or baggage from the past. What would you then design?

I think the process put forward here can be quite powerful. The concept of formulating the mess and then planning the ends without regards to the past is terrific. Then you plan how to get there and while what you end up with will probably not be what you "idealized", it will almost certainly be innovative and far ahead of where you would have been with incremental change. The authors' concept of dissolving the problem by looking at the containing factors and making the problem disappear by changing the container is also especially good.

However, it is in part III where the authors discuss the "urban car" and a health system for all Americans that things fall completely apart. They let the "container" of left-wing politics enter their notions without letting the reality of the marketplace discipline their final recommendations. The car is embarrassingly idiotic and the health care system is nothing more than a single payer system with all the fantasies of its supporters put forward as facts. Maybe the containing problem for urban congestion isn't the car but the way we subsidize life in cities. Maybe the containing problem in health care is the way we call pre-paid health care insurance and we need to rethink what needs to be insured and what needs to come out of pocket, like almost everything else in life.

Anyway, I think the process is quite good and is very much worth examining. There is much to be said for the very effective notions about Positive Change I heard at the University of Michigan Business School which now has a Center for Positive Change. Idealized Design and Positive Change are not equivalent, but they both share the notion that fixing problems and incremental change are more traps than cures. The organization you are a part of and the products you sell or the services you offer all arose to meet past needs. It may be that they have outlived their usefulness and tweaking them just won't get you where you need to go. Visualizing them as gone can be a great beginning of thinking about where you need to be tomorrow. The book (at least most of it) can be quite helpful in getting a process into place to help create and implement such constructive and complete change.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to adapt when you are facing the situation of adapt or die, July 12, 2006

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today (Hardcover)

In the modern world, you can send information around the world in less than a second. This has leveled the playing field across the globe, helping to create the growing rift in the earning power of Americans. The income of the upper half of the U. S. population continues to advance at a steady rate, but that of the lower half continues to decline. Even worse, the number of hours in the average work week continues to increase. All of this means that the old style of management that worked so well for so many years for American companies is now obsolete. The operative phrase is simple, "Adapt or die (quickly)!"
It is no longer reasonable to spend an extensive amount of time examining a problem from all sides, slowly working towards a consensus and then incrementally implementing the solution. One must be able to identify problems, create solutions and then execute them all within a very short time. This requires organizations to reorganize into flat hierarchies of decision making. The point of the authors is that this can and should be done in the design of everything the company does. This strategy of design extends to how the company is organized regarding the communication between personnel, to their relative locations in space, to how the products are built, how they are marketed, delivered and finally to how customer relations are handled.
Their phrase is idealized design, which is simply to design everything so that substantial changes are easy to implement. The explanations are done through a series of case studies, which are drawn from many areas of business, service and manufacturing. Two case studies are outside the business sector, one describes a non-profit academy for vocal arts and the other the White House communications agency. Clearly the most difficult task was that faced by the people in the White House communications agency. Theirs is a task where even the most apparently innocuous of errors can have dramatic consequences. Their schedule is often timed to the minute, and the wrong camera angle or the wrong word can give great offense to someone where offense is the last of all desired results. Implementing change in that environment is extremely difficult, after all you cannot ask the president to take a week off so that you can retool.
I was impressed by the information and advice offered up in this book, and I base this on two reasons. The first is that for almost everyone, the current reality is that they will have no choice. Nothing concentrates the mind like survival. Secondly, the advice is sensible, workable and can be applied across the entire organizational spectrum. I strongly recommend this book for all people who are major decision makers in their organizations.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dispel Tomorrow's Crisis Today, June 23, 2006

By 

Craig L. Howe "The Pointed Pundit" (Darien, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today (Hardcover)

Every organization faces interacting threats and opportunities. It is, perhaps, simplistic to argue the ideal solution to these problems is to imagine the ideal solution and then work backwards to today.

The authors refer to this six-step process as "idealized design."

* Idealization
1. Formulate the problem. Understand your organization's Achilles heel by preparing a systems analysis, an obstruction analysis, describe your organization's future without change and then project a scenario if nothing is done.
2. Ends Planning. This is the heart of the process. Once you understand where you are and where you want to be, identify the gaps.
* Realization
3. Means Planning
4. Resource Planning
5. Design of Implementation
6. Design of controls.

The authors include a chapter for government and another on the health-care challenge. They offer humane, effective and intriguing solutions to what often appears to be intractable problems.

"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error," wrote Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the German cultural figure. For many of us, it is easier said than changed. Idealized design offers a powerful tool for revolutionary thinking. Adding its tenets into our individual and organization thinking will help us adapt to today's environment of rapid change.