The Relevance of Interactions & the Value of Practice

I woke up this fine Sunday morning in Copenhagen and routinely turned on the radio, stumbling across a good BBC interview by Peter Day. As I am not an academic by trade (whatever that means), I am not familiar with very many theories and less with specific scholars behind the theories, however I am a sponge to well articulated ideas that put words to approximations of my thoughts. This interview is with the late Russell Ackoff who you may be familiar with, but I was not. If you have 20 minutes, it is a good piece that touches on management and some of the problems with business education. Take 20 minutes while you drink your coffee and have a listen. If you are so moved, give me your feedback on his perspectives.

Here are some notables I jotted down:

...its not what the parts do, but how they do things together. While research and experimentation is the paradigm for analytic thinking, design is the paradigm for synthetic thinking. Its about putting things together, not taking them apart. The importance of the parts lies in the way they interact, and not in how they act separately. You simply cannot treat the parts as independent entities.

Being taught might be the worst ways to learn anything. We too often confuse teaching with learning.

The specifics of what we learn in school is almost irrelevant. The important thing is that we learn how to learn and become more motivated to do so.

...Information is more valuable than data, knowledge more valuable than information, understanding more valuable than knowledge. But all time and effort are dedicated to information, less to knowledge, none to understanding, and even less to wisdom

3 contributions of business school education:

1. gives students a vocabulary allowing them to speak with authority about subjects they do not understand
2. gives them a set of operating principles to effectively withstand any amount of dis-confirming evidence
3. most importantly, it gives students a ticket to a job where they can learn something about business management

the worst kind of mistake is something you didnt do that you should have done.

Link to Interview

Cheers,

Max

Below is an unpublished draft I found on my blog that might as well be published as it represents some of the shit that rattled around between my ears on my business school trip to Copenhagen....

Business school for me is all about trying to honestly understand how businesses, large and small, function in our society. Below is a glimpse into a recent storm in my brain, where I am trying to clarify some of my confusion while coming up with a better set of questions to guide my learning process.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Working with a giant multinational corporation on this business project has (not surprisingly) been an eye-opening experience and a sincerely great opportunity to understand how business operates on such an immense scale. The organizational structure and bureaucracy involved in getting things done is something I still have a hard time getting my head wrapped around no matter how many times it is explained to me. So many times, problems of any kind seem to stem from an inability for stakeholders to communicate effectively throughout the value chain of an issue. Thus, business strategy is as much to me about identifying information gaps and facilitating a communication channel to open a discourse, as it is about efficiently producing widgets.

At my core, I am an idealist who thinks big, often looking beyond hurdles toward the alluring potential of a goal. I tend to break issues down to a simple level and ask basic questions about big ticket items. In this magnitude of a business structure, those questions are often met with a set of organizational protocols and structural bureaucracies that seem geared toward keeping the parts separate from the whole, inevitably delaying progress. Eg: Mr B wants to communicate with Ms D about how their products work together, but he must clear it through Mrs A, C and Mr Z first, who also need approval from someone but have no idea what the others even do. Furthermore, the financial incentive for Mr B and Ms D to collaborate will only marginally get back to them and will not justify the inevitable slog through the muddled process.

This thinking is primarily a riff off of my weekend ponderings on systems thinking, in that such procedural frustration reflects an inability for corporations to see and understand a bigger interrelated picture (insert forest and tree metaphor here). When it comes to the project I am working on, this theory of systems thinking seems quite applicable to the recommendation I am inching towards. I am creating a strategy to diffuse energy-efficiency related innovations into the construction process. Presumably, I am to focus on the specific market forces and understand how to most efficiently get individual products into that system. The premise of this perspective is a good example of the fragmented analytical type thinking described by Russell Ackoff (as mentioned), which in this case fails to see that an interrelated building (or business) system comprises more than the sum of the individual parts. To understand this market, it will require a more holistic approach of understanding the relations of the parts, which in reality must work together with people and the physical environment in order to make the most energy efficient building possible. Such an approach will illuminate the white space where gaps exist keeping the system from best working as an integrated whole. Understanding this perspective, and learning to see the negative space between the parts, may very well be the keys to promoting future R&D to best promote energy efficient design.

Often it seems that the more a corporation diversifies its offerings and business units, the more fragmented the seemingly simple response to "what do you do?" becomes. In my opinion, this depressed rate of communication is a microcosm of the larger industrial production culture, where focus is increasingly zoomed in on maximizing the efficiencies of the individual parts and not the relationships of those parts in creating a cohesive whole. Rarely in this system is it considered how the parts fit into their surrounding environment and interact with it. But why should they? What are the incentives to do so?

According to self-interest economic theory, the incentives will dictate that the objectives will be to maximize the wealth and security (utility) of the decision makers. So assuming this debatable economic theory to hold true, while considering the systems thinking I have been ranting on... there is no incentive to take a systems view in an organizational system where the profitability of products is separated into divisions (parts of the system). So is the real motivation to help innovate the most energy efficient building systems possible? Or is it to squeeze as big of margins out of each product to support the profitability of the silo'd product divisions? Following my spun together logic, the overarching objectives simply cannot sincerely be to support a functioning interrelated system.

Every company proclaims a list of forward thinking (sounding) objectives, but it appears that something has to give between economic theory and those proclamations. Assuming a level of sincerity in the stated objectives, a structural issue seems to be preventing large business's from doing what they allegedly intend to. With sincere intentions to establish a pipeline of information, then (in this case) to facilitate future innovations that work to make buildings function as coordinated interrelated energy efficient systems, according to my above logic... I need to know how the structure of the system simply should be adapted to allow the currently disconnected parts to work together to support a more functional interrelated system.

Nice rant...