Over the years, I was disinclined to read anything by Russell Ackoff largely because of my reservations regarding the notion of "management science". Then, I encountered and read his seminal if less known book On Purposeful Systems, and my high regard for it induced me to read Ackoff's Best. This latter book engagingly surveys a wide range of topics on a cogent, incisive, novel as well as readable basis. Despite the variety of topics offered, the chapters exhibit a surprising degree of continuity through the recurring invocation of his explicit terminology and underlying ideas/concepts.
Basically, I believe that Ackoff's original and provocative ideas are considerably enriched by his: training as a philosopher, pioneering role in systems thinking, and engaged/reflective consultation experience. Part I of Ackoff's Best introduces his systems thinking in a clear and substantive form. This includes background, rationale, and terminology for a systems mindset, and proceeds into penetrating if straightforward insights and concepts of general value in dealing with problematic real-world situations. Also, he describes a purposeful system as one that "selects means as well as ends", along with an important instance thereof called an ideal-seeking system. It can pursue an idealized goal by progressively approaching it more closely through a sequence of ever more refined sub-goals. In all, these ideas/concepts are not applicable merely in the management arena, but also to the engineering of physical systems.
Part II introduces Ackoff's distinction between the glib notion of "solving problems" and the practical necessity of "managing messes". He characterizes messes as systems of interrelated problems that are not amenable to ease of definition much less isolation. Furthermore, the problems and their couplings are not stationary; rather, they are evolving with time, thereby complicating the mess. Accordingly, he recommends interactive planning, which begins with the characterization of the mess. The nature of such planning centers on "the design of a desirable future, and the selection or invention of ways of bringing it about as closely as possible". The latter option involves utilization of the aforementioned ideal-seeking system. Accordingly, this book lays the groundwork for the formalization of his idealized design methodology, which Ackoff more specifically describes in another of his books.
A variety of system applications of Ackoff's concepts and methods appears in Part III. The one that I found most intriguing was the "Design of Management Systems". Here he defines management rather broadly as the "control of purposeful systems", a class much broader than just business enterprises. The example is a very rich one in that it addresses: organization management activities, management system support for those activities, and design methodology for developing the system. Detailed attention is directed to the learning and adaptation functions of the management support system in order to render the overall system purposeful, i.e., capable of making informed choices regarding both means and ends. Regarding incremental design of the overall management system, Ackoff advocates at first undertaking only a partial design of all subsystem coincidently, typically with only limited overall system functionality. This course contrasts with developing one complete subsystem at a time, thereby largely deferring the confrontation of problematic interactions among subsystems. This example coherently integrates and illustrates a lot of key ideas developed over the rest of the book.
In Part IV the book closes with a few essays on science, which describe important if subtle limitations on "hard" science. Objectivity, for example, is held necessarily to contain an element of qualitative judgment, thereby entailing that pure objectivity is unrealizable. Accordingly, Ackoff indicates that hard science is not as infallible or impervious to doubts or questioning as it is sometimes popularly regarded to be. Moreover, he cautions managers to guard against uncritical acceptance of statistical interpretations, like the classic case of correlation being assumed or insinuated to imply a cause-effect relationship. Perhaps most notably, operations research receives a rather severe critique here from one of it pioneers, largely due to its frequent detachment from practical, salient realities and to its tendency to seek refuge from "messes" in more tractable mathematical abstractions.
Valuable concepts or heuristics appear somewhat unobtrusively throughout the book. One notable concept is that of producer-product (a necessary but insufficient relationship), as contrasted with that of cause-effect (a necessary and sufficient relationship). The producer-product relationship takes on special interest when sufficiency is dependent on a system's environment, an interaction that is vitally important to systems thinking. An example of a problem-related heuristic states "A wrong solution to the right problem is generally better than the right solution to the wrong problem". A basic systems heuristic holds that "Optimization of parts can suboptimize the system as a whole". The value and mutual support of such ideas may not always be intuitively clear at first, but their worth is well supported and elucidated in the book.
Although Ackoff's Best is generally quite readable and readily understandable, it actually merits and rewards re-reading because it captures so much knowledge and wisdom from different perspectives. Moreover, Ackoff enhances the understandability of his ideas and summarizes/illustrates them through the modest but very effective use of figures and tables. The diagram of the overall management system in Part III is an excellent example. Ultimately, the book's aggregate content serves as an informed point of departure for exploring or applying either soft systems methodology or Ackoff's own idealized system design methodology. Even with my hard system methodology background/orientation, I consider these essays to be uniquely novel, insightful, well grounded, and of clear practical worth. In sum, a valuable book with surprisingly wide appeal!
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Top reviews from other countries
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- Andrew MarchReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 7, 2015
... theory then as the title suggests these are Ackoff's best bits.
- Mr. G. WilsonReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2021
A good intro to Ackoff
