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Russell L. Ackoff
69 quotes
“Another common deficiency is the failure of some panaceas to take into account a social system's developmental responsibilities to its stakeholders.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A corporation that fails to see itself as an instrument of all its stakeholders will probably fail to use them, and be used by them, effectively enough to survive in the emerging environment.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Doing philosophy was an opportunity to learn something new. I expected this to be an adjunct to my practice of architecture. But it turned out the other way. It turned out that the philosophy of science gave me the opportunity to design social systems, and I was more interested in people-oriented systems than in buildings. They were both design, but different kinds of design. I like creating things.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff cited in: Carole Novak (2000) "Interview with Russell L. Ackoff". in: Technos Quartely. Fall 2000 Vol. 9 No. 3. This quote is the answer to the question, why Ackoff switched from architecture to philosophy in his…
“A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say “no” but none to say “yes”. Bureaucrats can find an infinite number of reasons for rejecting any proposed change, but can find none for accepting it.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff (2006) A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management. p. 12.
“The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds. Problems that arise in organisations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part. Complex problems do not have simple solutions.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff (2007) as cited in: Stefan Stern (2009) "Fond farewell to a brilliant thinker". in: Financial Times, November 9, 2009.
“Analysis of a system reveals how it works; it provides know-how, knowledge, not understanding; that is, explanations of why it works the way it does. This [understanding of why systems work] requires synthetic thinking... Analysis is the way scientists conduct research. Synthetic thinking is exemplified by design.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff & Greenberg (2008) Turning Learning Right Side Up. p. 61 as cited in: Stephen M Millett (2011) Managing the Future: A Guide to Forecasting and Strategic Planning. p. 52.
“The lower the rank of managers, the more they know about fewer things. The higher the rank of managers, the less they know about many things.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 2 cited in: Gregory H. Watson (2010) "By rejecting the status quo, Russ Ackoff took systems thinking to greater heights" in: QP. vol 27, March 2010, p. 30.
“Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. For example, those who want a high quality of work life but don't know how to measure it, often settle for wanting a high standard of living because they can measure it.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 4, bold text cited in: Colin J. Neill, Phillip A. Laplante, Joanna F. DeFranco (2011) Antipatterns: Managing Software Organizations and People.
“The less sure managers are of their opinions, the more vigorously they defend them. Managers do not waste their time defending beliefs they hold strongly – they just assert them. Nor do they bother to refute what they strongly believe is false.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 8, bold text cited in: Gregory H. Watson (2010).
“The less important an issue is, the more time managers spend discussing it. More time is spent on small talk than is spent on large talk. Most talk is about what matters least. What matters least is what most of us know most about.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 16, bold text cited in: Gerald Haigh (2008) Inspirational, and Cautionary Tales for Would-be School Leaders. p. 142.
“Managers cannot learn from doing things right, only from doing them wrong”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 37 cited in: Andrew Carey (2008) Inside Project Red Stripe: Incubating Innovation and Teamwork at the Economist. p. 49.
“In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added... The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments... These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff (1959), "Games, Decisions and Organizations," General Systems, 4 (1959), p. 145-150; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 9.
“Despite the importance of systems concepts and the attention that they have received and are receiving, we do not yet have a unified or integrated set (i.e., a system) of such concepts. Different terms are used to refer to the same thing and the same term is used to refer to different things. This state is aggravated by the fact that the literature of systems research is widely dispersed and is therefore difficult to track. Researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and interdisciplines are contributing to the conceptual development of the systems sciences but these contributions are not as interactive and additive as they might be.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 1974 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in: Journal of systems management. Vol. 25, p. 39. Association for Systems Management, 1974.
“In proactive problem solving we specify where we want to go, and we try to get there. Although such an approach does not eliminate the possibility of overlooking relevant consequences of our solutions, it reduces the probability of doing so. The more ultimate the desired outcome we specify, the more likely we are to consider the intermediate and long-run consequences of our immediate actions. The more immediate the source of dissatisfaction we try to get rid of, the less likely we are to take account of relevant consequences. Therefore, the chances of overlooking relevant consequences are minimized when we formulate a problem in terms of approaching one or more ideals.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in: Problem Solving & Goal Setting blog, 24 October 2010.
“The Machine Age’s commitment to cause and effect was the source of many dilemmas, including the one involving free will. At the turn of the century the American philosopher E.A. Singer, Jr., showed that science had, in effect, been cheating. It was using two different relationships but calling both cause and effect. He pointed out, for example, that acorns do not cause oaks because they are not sufficient, even though they are necessary, for oaks. An acorn thrown into the ocean, or planted in the desert or an Arctic ice cap does not yield an oak. To call the relationship between an acorn and an oak ‘probabilistic’ or ‘non deterministic causality,’ as many scientists did, was cheating because it is not possible to have a probability other than 1.0 associated with a cause; a cause completely determines its effect. Therefore, Singer chose to call this relationship ‘producer-product’ and to differentiate it from cause-effect.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 224-225 as cited in: (2010) "The producer-product relation, and coproducers in systems theory". in the Coevolving blog, September 02, 2010.
“I began graduate work in the philosophy of sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941 where I came under the influence of the “grand old man” of the department, the eminent philosopher E.A. Singer, Jr. Because of the informality of the department he created I began to collaborate with two younger members of the faculty, both of whom were former students of Singer, Thomas A. Cown and C. West Churchman. Three aspects of Singer's philosophy had a particularly strong influence on me. First, that the practice of philosophy, its application, was necessary for the development of philosophy itself. Second, that effective work on “real” problems required an interdisciplinary approach. Third, that the social area needed more work than any of the other domains of science and that this was the most difficult. We developed a concept of a research group that would enable us to practice philosophy in the social domain by dealing with real problems. The organization we designed was called “The Institute of Experimental Method.” With the participation of a number of other graduate students in philosophy and a few other members of the faculty we started this institute on a completely informal basis.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture. Elsevier, 2011. p. xii
“In the spring of 1951 Churchman and I accepted appointments to (then) Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland because Case was committed to establishing an activity in Operations Research and Churchman and I had come to believe we could probably work better under this name than under the cloak of academic philosophy. By the end of 1952 we had formal approval, but not without faculty opposition, for the first doctoral program in Operations Research. From then on the Group and the program grew rapidly and flourished. Case became a mecca to which pilgrimages of operations researchers from around the world came. In 1958, Churchman, for personal reasons, migrated to the University of California at Berkeley where he established a similar activity. Academic Operations Research activities began to proliferate and flourish, many of them modeled on those at Case.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii
“In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints. First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii
“Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems... the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it.”
Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ackoff (1999). "Disciplines, the two cultures and the scianities". Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 16 (6), p. 537. Cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. S…