Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

When I took a personality test at work years ago, I was identified categorically as a "designer", someone who envisions the ideal result and gets pleasure in developing the road map to make the ideal into a reality. Idealized design founder and former Wharton professor in systems theory Russell L. Ackoff, along with co-authors Jason Magidson and Herbert J. Addison, have elevated my natural inclination into a management philosophy that drives transformative change while remaining true to a company's defined objective. Their primary thesis is that organizations need to be clear on their optimal business outcome and then work backwards to achieve it. This is a major jump ahead of standard process re-engineering since idealized design does not start with a base of falsity about success. At the same time, the concept represents a new way of thinking that may take a while to be embraced by those who must implement it.

In focusing on the idealized vision, Ackoff and his colleagues concisely spell out how many obstacles, often self-inflicted, are eliminated and go as far as identifying the preventative measures that represent a major sea change to a company. What makes the eminently readable book particularly useful is the wide-ranging variety of case studies presented which show empirical evidence of idealized design in action. Most inspiring is Ackoff's own example of working with Bell Labs in the 1950's with the intent of redesigning the telephone. The company was applying then-common practice in looking at making incremental improvements in the standard telephone features - the dial, coaxial cabling and multiplexing. However, by looking at what the management team wanted to achieve as a whole, Ackoff was able to lead the effort toward more revolutionary items such as touch-tone phones, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calls, voice mail, and what was then the beginning of the mobile phone.

From this seminal case study come several contemporary applications of idealized design including fascinating looks at subjects ranging from the redesign of Paris for the future to a drastic overhaul of the current health care system to General Motor's launch of the OnStar system. The most useful chapters are the three most thorough case studies presented - Energetics as an example of the private sector, the Academy of Vocal Arts for non-profits, and the White House Communications Agency as a specific application within the perceived constraints of the U.S. government. The case for idealized design is executed with a minimum of polemics, and the book offers practical information on how best to implement such change in currently vision-blocked companies.

This book offers practical and common sense methods, based on proven results to allow organizations to not only learn from mistkaes but to develop processes to remove the possibility of mistakes in the future, not just "reengineering", but a revolution in the way your organization is run. As the owner of a organization of 80 people, we have implemented some of the concepts discussed and are already seeing results. All of our managers (and some of our business partners) are getting copies of this "must read".

This book offers a tremendously intuitive approach to focusing an organization on what needs to be changed. Its step-by-step guidance could be a little more detailed but in general it offers a great "blueprint" for improving an organization.

Well worth the read and trying to implement.

"Idealized Design" by Russel Ackoff (primarily), Jason Magidson, and Herbert Addison emphasizes identifying the best solutions for the common business and non-business obstacles and ailments we face in management, work, life, and society as a collective whole.

In "Idealized Design" there are several case studies examined in the private, non-profit, and governmental public sector. Therefore, this book may be useful for readers in many different organizations.

The authors' concepts were reinforced in several case studies. Some of the case studies such as the the study on the General Motors OnStar system seem realistic, while the United Nations organizational proposal appears a bit lofty. One example, is the two seat mini-urban car suggested. a very small mini-car car with two seats: one in front, and one in back. The likes of a giant go- kart. Is this ideal? Why not just design, construct, and use public transportation systems? Less fuel needed and expended (reduced emissions), less parking space allocated, reduced insurance costs, wasted time, and less stress.

Perhaps the suggestion of the mini-car is due to the fixation on car ownership and use for commuting in the high-density populated cities, burbs, and edge cities of America. This fact alone is a major obstacle in designing and implementing the most efficient "idealized design" to rectify this dilemma. However, an obstacle to a potential solution (of more public transportation)is the fact that getting Americans out of their cars is extremely difficult. Hence, the notion of the narrow mini car with two seats becomes more plausible because it is a car. But is it the answer or partial answer to the fundamental problem related to car-reliance? No. It's a temporary band-aid. Perhaps this is a bit too "idealized" in it's design. Anything can be idealistically designed. But what percentage of these designs are implemented?

Los Angeles and Orange County, and numerous other metro regions continue to attempt to lessen congestion by....building more highways. Yes, the new highways are needed. But they are soon filled up again based on statistical studies. And, the population of almost all metro/suburban regions in the U.S. will rise dramatically in the coming decades.

As for the process of solving problems, there are six steps or phases, applied to these new designs and concepts in this book:

1) Formulate the Problem 2) Ends planning 3) Means Planning 4) Resource Planning 5) Design of Implementation 6) Design of Controls

Insights and potential solutions into the Health-Care system and government are also examined. A real issue that affects almost all of us, or people we know. However, political forces and interest groups can cloud six-step process of providing solutions to problem, in issues such as this.

One point in "Idealized Design" commonly touted today is the necessity to constantly think of ways to adapt technology and innovation to improve our lives. More commonly, the impetus is to improve an organization's profit margin and competitiveness.

One concept advocated is 'flattening hierarchies' in organizations in our ever-changing business world because of technological innovations in communication, and the escalation of global competition.

Designing for an idealistic end-result is quite noble. It needs to be done. Sometimes these results are achieved, oft-times they are not.

Yet the planning and designing needs to be done. We, as a society, or as a small or large private or public organization, must always look for the most optimal ways to solve problems, overcome challenges, achieve goals, and make the conditions we live in the best we can.

A good book.

I purchased this book beacuse it was a required reading for my Leadership class. I am not one that really likes to reads, but I found it a really inspiring book.

When I first picked up this book I was expecting to see some kind of treatise on industrial design. Here would be new coffee pots, new cars or computers or something like that. Instead, it's not on that at all, but on the designs of business organizations, of new product development, of new technologies.

All in all, it presents a concept, a way of thinking that numerous companies have successfully used, primarily to get themselves out of trouble. You don't think in terms of change when things are going well. It's a way of looking at the set of interacting threats and opportunities and making some sense out of the mess. It tends to be oriented to what can we do right now, with current technology, that does not require too much predicting of the future.

The book has a broad set of case studies. One of my immediate problems is with the future of a non-profit theatre with which I am associated. There's a case study on a non-profit.

There's a case study on the General Motors OnStar system which is a success within a corporation that continues to lose market share and profits. A company like GM must have successes in it's departments, but what happens if the company itself fails?

Some of their case studies are really optimistic. For instance their re-design of the United Nations sounds pretty good from a standpoint of world security. But it has a few problems, for instance, the United States would not be allowed to join.

Some of their projects are pretty far out, like the small Urban car. This is a small, two seater with the people sitting fore and aft. (How will young men and young women make out?)

All in all, a good concept for working on tomorrow's crisis today, just like the sub-title says. It offers a procedure for analyzing a companys situation that can work when properly applied and is a very interesting read. It's interesting enough that reading it on your next plane trip is a good option.