Continuous improvement-II

Abstract

Most continuous-improvement programs, like most strategic plans, work from where one is to where one wants to be at some time in the future, whereas interactive management and planing (Ackoff, 1981) work backward from where one wants to be fight now to where one is right now. The reason is, Unless one knows where one wants to be fight now, how can one possibly know where one will want to be at some time in the future? Furthermore, where we currently want to be in the future is usually very different from where we will want to be when we are at that future moment of time. Where we wanted to be at age 30 when we were a teenager was very different from where we wanted to be at age 30. Therefore, interactive improvement programs are continually working to close the gap between where we are now and where we want to be now, not at some arbitrarily selected point in the future, such as 5 or 10 years out. In interactive improvement programs it is not necessary, as it is in continuous-improvement programs, to forecast the future; the future is taken into account in a different way. In an environment such as ours in which change and complexity are occurring at an accelerating rate, our ability to forecast is deteriorating significantly. More important, however, is the growing realization that we do not have to forecast the future in order to deal with it. There is a better w a y . For example, we do not have to forecast the weather in buildings. Buildings are artifacts created by man for the purpose of controlling the weather. This eliminates the need to forecast and prepare for it. Management should be building buildings, not predicting and preparing for the weather. We can effectively deal with the future by (1) increasing our control of it, (2) making assumptions about the rest, and (3) making contingency plans based on these assumptions. Assumptions about the future are very different from forecasts. For example, we carry a spare tire in our cars not because we forecast a flat tire the next time we go out-in fact, we forecast that we will not have one.