Russell Ackoff Research Articles

Too Much Information: When Does Additional Testing Benefit Schools?

U.S. K–12 school districts that traditionally utilized ongoing “formative” assessments of student progress increasingly rely on additional “interim” assessments to predict student performance on standardized tests. Moreover, some districts are experimenting with merit-based teacher bonuses tied to standardized test scores. We examine the relationship between interim assessments and teacher bonuses using a two-period principal–agent model. The school district (principal), operating under a limited budget, decides whether to implement interim assessments and how much merit pay to offer, and teachers (agents) choose how much effort to exert in each period. We use two-state (proficient versus not proficient) Markovian dynamics to describe the evolution of student test readiness, in which the transition probability in a given period depends on both teachers’ effort decisions and the starting state. Our results indicate that, despite the popularity of interim assessments, their usefulness is far from guaranteed. In particular, the accuracy promised by these assessments is a double-edged sword: positive midyear results can make it easier to incentivize second period teacher effort, but negative results can have a demotivating effect. Moreover, even when an interim assessment does result in a higher probability of the school ending the year in the proficient state, the resulting higher expected costs of merit-based bonuses for the district may exceed the available budget. Thus, even a free interim assessment might be too expensive for the school district. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management. Funding: This research was supported by the Risk Management Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship and the Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management, both at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.01547 .

The Value of Social Media Data in Fashion Forecasting

Problem definition: How to use social media to predict style color and jeans fit sales for a retailer. Academic/practical relevance: Neither retail practice nor the academic literature provides a method for using social media to predict style color and jeans fit sales for a retailer. We present and validate a systematic approach for doing that. Methodology: Demand forecasting in the fashion industry is challenging due to short product lifetimes, long manufacturing lead times, and constant innovation of fashion products. We investigate the value of social media information for color trends and jeans fit forecasting. We partner with three multinational retailers, two apparel and one footwear, and combine their proprietary data sets with web-crawled publicly available data on Twitter and the Google Search Volume Index. We implement a variety of machine learning models to develop forecasts that can be used in setting the initial shipment quantity for an item, arguably the most important decision for fashion retailers. Results: Our findings show that fine-grained social media information has significant predictive power in forecasting color and fit demands months in advance of the sales season, and therefore greatly helps in making the initial shipment quantity decision. The predictive power of including social media features, measured by the improvement of the out-of-sample mean absolute deviation over current practice ranges from 24% to 57%. Managerial implications: To our knowledge, this study is the first to explore and demonstrate the value of social media information in fashion demand forecasting in a way that is practical and operable for fashion retailers. With consistent results across all three retailers, we demonstrate the robustness of our findings over market and geographic heterogeneity, and different forecast horizons. Moreover, we discuss potential mechanisms that might be driving this significant predictive power. Our results suggest that changes in fashion demand are driven more by “bottom-up” changes in consumer preferences than by “top-down” influence from the fashion industry. Funding: This work was supported by Wharton School Fishman-Davidson Center for Service and Operations Management, the Wharton School Baker Retailing Center, and the Wharton School Risk Management Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1193 .

APPLYING CLASSICAL MANAGEMENT KEYNOTES OF ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR IN AGILE MANAGEMENT APPROACHES

This paper analyzes the works of management classics such as Russell Ackoff, Nancy Adler, Frederick Herzberg, Chris Argyris, Bennis Warren, Lyndall Urwick, experts of Aston Group, and others. A common bond between them is organizational behavior and the fact that their work was written in the last century and that elements of their theories were the basis for the neoclassical management theories that predominate today.
 Purpose. The aim is to identify commonalities with the iterative-incremental (agile) approach to development and management from classical management theories.
 Methodology. The paper analyses classical management papers in organizational behavior and leadership theory to identify commonalities with the iterative-incremental approach to management. The two categories are considered holistically, as leadership can determine organizational behavior. The paper applies ontological and integrated approaches.
 Results. The paper identifies standard features of classical theories and agile approaches to management. It indicates that classical approaches to management have formed the basis of agile approaches to management.
 Practical implications. The results apply to social management and organizational psychology scholars. In addition, the results will help to scientists write textbooks and manuals on management theory and related disciplines. The study’s results contribute to developing the history of managerial thought.

Participatory Analysis of Small-Scale Artisanal Gold Mining in the Santa Rita District, Municipality of Andes, Antioquia, Based on the PAIIO Methodology

Small-scale artisanal mining, MAPE (for its initials in Spanish), presents significant challenges and opportunities that must be analyzed systemically. To carry out the analysis, this paper proposes the PAIIO methodology (Participation, Actors, Impact, Idealized design, Opportunities), based on the Russell Ackoff Interactive Planning methodology. This proposed methodology propounds four steps to address environmental and common property management issues, where local communities must be the key player in decision-making, participating from the design of the solution in its implementation and monitoring. The PAIIO methodology was applied in the MAPE study in the Santa Rita village, Municipality of Andes. As a first step, for the development of the methodology in the case study, key actors in the community were identified, such as “barequeros” (gold miners) and scrap dealers, workers in the pitheads, workers of the “entables” (ranches); from their perceptions, impacts of the MAPE were identified; subsequently, together with them, the idealized design of the situation, the gaps between this design and the real situation were depicted; and finally, proposals and improvement opportunities were described to close the gaps between these scenarios. The community’s proposals go beyond good practices in mining, involving proposals related to their organization and investment in the territory.

Reflections on Russell Ackoff's Legacy in the Centenary Year of His Birth

Russell Ackoff's iconoclastic journey through the scholarly world illustrates just how far ahead of his time he was, and how much we all still owe him. His influence was so fundamental that today we accept his once‐controversial ideas as taken for granted realities. Every time you try to grasp the complexities of an interdependent system, try to understand the root causes of problems that appear on the surface or try to “connect the dots,” you are drawing on the groundwork laid by Russ. It would be difficult to overstate his impact.

Systems Thinking applied to curriculum and pedagogy: a review of the literature

This paper proposes Systems Thinking as a methodology to better observe, learn, analyse and construct curriculum and pedagogy. Informed by von Bertalanffy’s (1950) principle of Dynamic Equilibrium (Fliessgleichgewich), Systems Thinking presents a means to consider complex systems as continuously breaking down and rebuilding to adapt and maintain function. In addition, I refer to two root metaphors applied by key systems theorists: (i) Descartes world like a machine (reductionism) and (ii) world like an Ecology (holism) and relate these to a Systems Thinking approach to curriculum construction, pedagogy and learning. I also draw upon the Aristotelian dictum: ‘the whole is greater than its parts’ (gestalt) to illustrate how elements of all systems are interconnected and how the application of Systems Thinking can inform new pedagogical approaches and curriculum design. In explaining how a Systems Thinking approach could apply to curriculum development, I draw on two key theorists who draw their perspectives from organismic biology: Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Fritjof Capra, and compare their concepts with theorists who focus on more organisational and applied perspectives, such as Russell Ackoff and Peter Senge. I link this spectrum of Systems Thinking to curriculum development, by first considering its specific relevance to education through its relationship to applied approaches to learning, such as those proposed by Kurt Fischer and Zheng Yan (1998) and Fischer (2019). I then consider the potential for Systems Thinking to act as an analytical tool, which can be applied to global/national educational policy and practice. By looking at critiques of the reductionist Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) as described by Sahlberg (2012), I consider the ways in which taking a Systems Thinking lens can shift the balance in curriculum design more towards Capra’s proposal for a deeper ecology in learning. Finally, I examine the case of the Australian Curriculum and outline how Systems Thinking provides an innovative methodology to support curriculum development of relevance to today’s context. In considering effective historic and emerging initiatives, I propose future approaches where Systems Thinking can be a co-creation tool for learners throughout the education system that is sensitive to student self-efficacy, personalised and independent learning. This is imperative if we are going to prepare students for a future world that cannot be conceived, predicted nor imagined.

Architecture as a system and innovation design discipline

Talking about architecture means talking not only about buildings but also about processes or systems. In the latter context, architecture is a way of thinking and looking at people, spaces, interrelations and interactions. Proclaimed by IDEO’s Tim Brown as one of the best system design forms of education available, architecture has potential in fields beyond the physical. In keeping with the views of renowned systems thinker Russell Ackoff, who graduated in architecture before focusing on operations research, the question arises whether the skills of architects can be applied more broadly in system and innovation design. This paper describes how architects deal with context and complexity from the perspective of the practice-oriented architectural programming method. From its early days in the 1960s, it offered architects a viable basis for an applied architectural design thinking method, but did not receive widespread attention from practitioners and academics. The method is critically assessed and compared to the known forms of design thinking from the viewpoint of industrial design. By describing a real-life project and students’ work from a newly created seminar in a department of architecture, the paper investigates the current and future relevance of an advanced version of architectural programming for architectural practice and education. It stresses the desirability of reinforcing the core skills of architects by developing a design thinking method rooted in architecture, which needs to be taught, developed and disseminated. In the long term, it is argued, architecture should be considered and integrated as a ‘systems and innovation design discipline’ in the fields of systems thinking and innovation research.

Systems Thinking Managing Chaos and Complexity

This book is the third edition of the Author’s System Thinking and was first published in 1999 by Butterworth-Heinemann Title. This book is a direct result of the author's work with the systems methodology first introduced by the author's partner, Russell Ackoff, one of the founding fathers of systems thinking. Ackoff reported that it was the most comprehensive systems methodology he has seen.

C. West Churchman: Champion of the Systems Approach

Briefly summarizes C.West Churchman's professional evolution and some of his key ideas.C. West Churchman was educated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philosophy, and studied under the world‐renown philosopher, E.A. Singer. Although his contributions are many, as he has written hundreds of articles, books, and proceedings, he is primarily known for being a founder and champion of the “systems approach” (a holistic, scientific approach to systems planning). To become acquainted with Churchman’s ideas, it is important to briefly address his conceptual evolution, then to broadly introduce the systems approach using three books: The Systems Approach (1969), Designing inquiring Systems (1971), and The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979). A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Churchman, including Russell Ackoff, Peter Checkland, and Werner Ulrich, and they will be briefly discussed.

Designing consumer health IT to enhance usability among different racial and ethnic groups within the United States

Racial and ethnic healthcare disparities remain after differences in income, access, and insurance status have been considered, partly because of the healthcare delivery system’s failure to respond to cultural differences. The Institute of Medicine has called for the development and deployment of culturally appropriate healthcare services to mitigate these disparities. This complex problem of determining how to address the cultural components of racial and ethnic healthcare disparities is an example of what Russell Ackoff terms “messes.” Given consumer health information technology (IT)’s increasing role in patients’ self-care and self-management, one potential solution lies in designing consumer health IT that is culturally-informed. Although both the healthcare informatics community and the engineering design community have begun to seriously consider the role of culture in design to enhance usability, much work remains. Unfortunately, creating culturally-informed consumer health IT can seem daunting, limiting designers’ efforts. We propose the Culturally-Informed Design Framework as a guide for designers of consumer health IT. Designers may use this framework to conceptualize four dimensions of a consumer health IT – technology platform, functionality, content, user interface—in which design choices should be informed by a deep understanding of the users’ culture.

More on anti‐spam, history of chess, Russ Ackoff

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review a recent electronic publication on the menace of spam and, related to previous work, look at the dangers the internet holds for children. A valuable source of information on history of chess is reviewed and the death of Prof. Russell Ackoff in Philadelphia is reported, with links to sources of obituaries and further details.Design/methodology/approachThe aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.FindingsThe data on spam indicate, the nature and extent of the problem it presents. Chess is shown to have deeper historical roots than is widely known. With the death of Russ Ackoff another major figure has disappeared from the scene.Practical implicationsThe review of means of combating spam is of undoubted value, as is the mention of a means of seeking police help over internet abuse affecting children. The review of history of chess should be a valuable reference where the game is discussed in an AI context.Originality/valueIt is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

Learn Change Leadership from Two Great Teachers

If you need to change your organization, to make it more efficient and effective, 1 advise you to first get acquainted with the thinking of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) and Russell Ackoff (1919-2009). I had the very good fortune to learn directly from both of these theorists who have contributed so much to our most advanced understanding of change leadership. During 1990-'93, Deming invited me to meet with him regularly to discuss leadership and change. Ackoff and I worked together for more than 20 years at workshops and on change projects. After World War II, Deming's teaching helped Japanese industry produce high-quality products and drive waste out of the system. In the 1980s, Ford improved quality by using his methods which evolved into the Six Sigma approach that has made American products more competitive. Although both thinkers came from technical backgrounds--Deming from statistics, Ackoff from architecture and operations research--both combined technical and psychological factors in their systems thinking. Both emphasized the importance of the human side. Although you can apply Deming's philosophy to any managerial challenge, his teachings about quality improvement, with emphasis on reducing variation, are mainly useful for designing processes for manufacturing products so they fit specifications, less so to organizing technical service and knowledge work. For example, Florida Power and Light applied the Deming principles to technical service and became the first non-Japanese company to win the Deming Prize. But after a few years, it had to backtrack and undo many of the prize-winning processes. I learned the reason from an FPL service technician who was made by the Deming experts to follow strict repair processes. Previously, service technicians had kept notebooks for different ways of dealing with service problems in different parts of Florida, such as large urban buildings, suburban houses and swampy rural areas. Once required to follow the quality processes and get rid of variation, they put their notebooks in their lockers. The result was to lower productivity and increase cost. A new CEO ended the program. What Would Deming Think? I learned about the FPL story after Deming's death, so I don't know how he would have responded to it. In one of our conversations, I did question the applicability of statistical process control to the knowledge work I was observing in my consulting, but Deming did not comment. In his nineties, he was interested in clarifying his theories, not revising them. However, he always emphasized that if errors were made in production, management should find out if they were symptoms of a faulty system rather than, as so often happened, immediately blaming the worker. Furthermore, because he believed that employees worked best when their intrinsic motivation was engaged, when they most enjoyed their work, he would have had to recognize that the quality processes were dampening the motivation of the FPL service techs. Social vs. Mechanical/Organic Systems Ackoff's theories helped me to understand how to design organizations with the built-in variability and interactivity of knowledge work. Ackoff described organizations where professionals produce new ideas and solutions for customers as social systems, contrasting them to mechanical and organic systems. He defined a system as a collection of interacting parts with a purpose. Each part should be evaluated according to how well it furthers the system's purpose, and the system itself can be evaluated according to how well it fits larger systems. Ackoff liked to give the example of trying to build a car with the best parts in the world, collected from different makes. Of course, you would have a pile of junk, since the parts were not designed to fit together. He would then point out that people in companies typically try to make their departments--engineering, finance, research, HR, marketing, design--the best in the world rather than the best in terms of strengthening their company's organizational system. …

IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Jay Wright Forrester

IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Jay Wright Forrester

New Phytologist interactions

<i>New Phytologist</i> interactions

IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame . Russell L. Ackoff

International Transactions in Operational ResearchVolume 12, Issue 1 p. 129-134 Free Access IFORS' Operational Research Hall of Fame Russell L. Ackoff Maurice Kirby, Maurice KirbySearch for more papers by this authorJonathan Rosenhead, Jonathan RosenheadSearch for more papers by this author Maurice Kirby, Maurice KirbySearch for more papers by this authorJonathan Rosenhead, Jonathan RosenheadSearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 January 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-3995.2005.00493.xCitations: 13AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat References Chesterton, K., Goodsman, R., Rosenhead, J., Thunhurst, C., 1975. A comment on Ackoff's ‘The social responsibility of operational research’. Operational Research Quarterly, 26, 91– 95. Friend, J.K., 1990. Planning concepts, planning contexts. Systems Practice, 3, 195– 206. G. Midgley (ed.) 2003. Systems Thinking. Sage, London. Rosenhead, J.V., 1976. Some further comments on the social responsibility of operational research. Operational Research Quarterly, 27, 266– 272. Selected original works Ackoff, R.L., 1957. Operations research and national planning. Operations Research, 5, 457– 468. Ackoff, R.L., 1961. The meaning, scope and methods of operations research. In: R.L. Ackoff (Ed.) Progress in Operations Research 1. John Wiley, New York, pp. 1– 34. Ackoff, R.L., 1962. Scientific Method: Optimising Applied Research Decisions. John Wiley, New York. Ackoff, R.L., 1970. A Concept of Corporate Planning. John Wiley, New York. Ackoff, R.L., Emery, F.E., 1972. On Purposeful Systems. Tavistock, London. Ackoff, R.L., 1973. Science in the Systems Age: beyond IE, OR and MS. Operations Research, 21, 661– 671. Ackoff, R.L., 1974a. The social responsibility of OR. Operational Research Quarterly, 25, 361– 371. Ackoff, R.L., 1974b. Redesigning the Future. John Wiley, New York. Ackoff, R.L., 1977a. National development planning revisited. Operations Research, 25, 207– 218. Ackoff, R.L., 1977b. Optimization+objectivity=opt out. European Journal of Operational Research, 1, 1– 7. Ackoff, R.L., 1979a. The future of operational research is past. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 30, 93– 104. Ackoff, R.L., 1979b. Resurrecting the future of operational research. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 30, 189– 199. Ackoff, R.L., 1987. President's Symposium: OR, a post-mortem. Operations Research, 35, 471– 474. Ackoff, R.L., 1991. Ackoff's Fables. John Wiley, New York. Ackoff, R.L., 1999. Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century. Oxford University Press, New York. Churchman, C.W., Ackoff, R.L., Arnoff, E.L., 1957. Introduction to Operations Research. John Wiley, New York. Rivett, B.H.P., Ackoff, R.L., 1963. A Manager's Guide to Operations Research. John Wiley, New York. Biographical material and commentaries J.-M. Choukroun, R. Snow (eds) 1992. Planning for Human Systems. University of Pennsylvania Press, Pennsylvania, (Festschrift for Russ Ackoff). Flood, R.L., 1998. Ackoff, Russell L. (1919-). In: M. Warner (Ed.), The IEBM Handbook of Management Thinking. International Thomson Business Press, London, pp. 1– 7. Jackson, M.C., 1982. The nature of soft systems thinking: the work of Churchman, Ackoff and Checkland. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 9, 17– 29. Kirby, M.W., 2003. The intellectual journey of Russell Ackoff: from OR apostle to OR apostate. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 54, 1127– 1140.DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601627 Citing Literature Volume12, Issue1January 2005Pages 129-134 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Crises as Ill-Structured Messes

The field of crisis management has been seriously impeded by its failure to develop appropriate frameworks for the study of crises. This state of affairs is due at the very least to two major issues: (1) outmoded and invalid views of the nature of crises, and (2) the widespread use of outmoded and inappropriate concepts of inquiry. It is our contention that crisis management deals with problems that are inherently ill-structured. The eminent social systems philosopher and scientist, Russell Ackoff (1999), has coined the term “mess” to describe such problems. A mess is a system of problems that are highly interactive (that is, strongly coupled), but it is not the sum of the separate problems themselves. A mess is the product of the interactions among the problems that constitute it. A crisis, then, is an ill-structured mess—a highly interactive set of problems, each of which is ill-structured. The problems...

The intellectual journey of Russell Ackoff: from OR apostle to OR apostate

Russell Ackoff has had a distinguished career in operational research both as an academic and practitioner. His influence on the development of the discipline in the US and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s was considerable. Yet during the 1970s Ackoff registered increasing disillusion with the course and conduct of OR on both sides of the Atlantic. His rejection of the established mathematical paradigm and appeal for a wider social and political remit for the discipline was writ large at the UK Operational Research Society's conference in 1978. This paper, stimulated by the author's research into the history of British OR, analyses the evolution of Ackoff's thought in order to explain the sources of his disillusion and the short and longer term reactions to his recantation.

Causes of the Decline of the Business School Management Science Course

The business school management science course is suffering serious decline. The traditional model- and algorithm-based course fails to meet the needs of MBA programs and students. Poor student mathematical preparation is a reality, and is not an acceptable justification for poor teaching outcomes. Management science Ph.D.s are often poorly prepared to teach in a general management program, having more experience and interest in algorithms than management. The management science profession as a whole has focused its attention on algorithms and a narrow subset of management problems for which they are most applicable. In contrast, MBA's rarely encounter problems that are suitable for straightforward application of management science tools, living instead in a world where problems are ill-defined, data is scarce, time is short, politics is dominant, and rational “decision makers” are non-existent. The root cause of the profession's failure to address these issues seems to be (in Russell Ackoff's words) a habit of professional introversion that caused the profession to be uninterested in what MBA's really do on the job and how management science can help them.

Creating common ground: A lesson from the past

Orthodox business ethics, conventional management theory, and a great deal of higher education embody the overriding emphasis accorded to “analysis” by yesteryear's science. An alternative strategy, exemplified by the war stories told by a Confederate Genral, is more consistent with late 20th century science in general and soft systems methodology in particular. The characteristic way of management that we have taught... is to take a complex system, divide it into parts, and then try to manage each part as well as possible. And if that's done, the system as a whole will behave well, and that's absolutely false because it's possible to improve the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system at the same time. Russell Ackoff

Crisis as Status Quo: A Systems Approach to Understanding Institutional Organizations During a Period of Societal Transformation*

A detailed description of current societal transformation is presented emphasizing the shift from mechanistic to holistic thought, the proliferation of technology, and the shift to post-industrial society. The conservative role societal institutions play during periods of stability is discussed along with the problems that arise during periods of transition. A theoretical framework for describing the conservative behavior of these organizations based on the work of Russell Ackoff and Donald Schon is presented. It indicates that the systems behave in ways characteristic of bureaucratic monopolies. The piece concludes with a brief discussion of organizational alternatives to the existing institutional forms incorporating systemic concepts of organizational design.