- Theme: Russell Ackoff. System Thinking and Management
- Presenter: Jannis de Riz
The aim of the seminar is to gain a more detailed understanding of the concept of systems and basic approaches of Russell L. Ackoff's management theory, the main features of which were developed in the early 1970s.
In the seminar it became clear that Ackoff's systems theoretical approaches to management theory date back to the 1970s and are strongly influenced by the developments at that time, especially in cybernetics. With the availability of the first computers at that time, questions of control theory were newly discussed, which in the pre-computer age could often only be solved by filigree mechanical constructions such as the pressure regulator on steam engines, the clock pendulum, etc. The computer opened up completely new dimensions of management and control through data collected and processed at the right time, even though technology at that time was still far from being able to realise the mature theoretical concepts that had already been conceived. The roots also reach far back into the first decades of the 20th century to the beginnings of assembly line production, the associated standardisation of operating procedures and the possibilities and realisation of a parallel emerging automation technology. In the cybernetics wave of the 1960s, practical applications of control circuits in various domains played an important role, right up to the "skilled worker for BMSR technology" as a newly emerging profession in the GDR economy. So much about the background of Ackoff's theoretical approaches. See also (Steinbuch 1966), (Steinbuch 1971) or (Prigogine/Stengers 1981).
It is interesting to note the convergence of Ackoff's concept of system with those introduced earlier in the lecture and the seminar, but also their differences. Ackoff, too, sees the constitutive property of a system in the interaction of its components and the emergent functionality resulting from it. This phenomenon, which is also called synergy, leads from concurrency and, in the worst case, opposition of the components to a cooperation. In contrast to TRIZ, where the creation of such a cooperation is a constructive engineering achievement, Ackoff takes up the idea with the concepts of organismic and social systems that such synergetic or symbiotic (as a higher form of synergy) structuring phenomena also occur "spontaneously" and without "constructive" intention under natural-biological (organismic) or socio-cultural conditions of humans' co-operative actions. In the field of management, especially systematic management, the idea then arises to influence such "natural" processes also in socio-economic systems, namely in organisations, in order to push them in a certain direction through active management action (ultimately in a technical understanding of "social engineering" and management as a kind of engineering profession).
An essential contradiction arose from the attempt to gain influence on systemic processes with such individual management action, the emergent character of which had just been postulated, i.e. which precisely does not develop from the influence of one component alone, even if it is at the top of a management hierarchy and concentrates great decision-making powers in its hands.
However, this is exactly what is done in system's analysis - first structural analysis and then procedural analysis are performed, the analysis of the interaction of the parts. These contradictory views are present both in the system concept of the lecture and in Shchedrovitsky's argumentation [MSM, p. 61 cont.]. Shchedrovitsky further asks (p. 58) what is the significance of a "human component" in such a system (i.e. in an organisation), which on the one hand is a "cog in the system" (ibid.) when it is about functioning of the system as a whole, while on the other hand the (formal) organisation as a "living organisation" has an "informal structure" (ibid.). Shchedrovitsky goes on to ask what it means for a "manager component" to be an element of two subsystems of the organisation and thus of the system as a whole, on the one hand in the management circle of the company and on the other hand as the head of his own department (p. 61). Is this manager then not rather the link, the "transmission rod" (ibid.) between these two subsystems?
Is Ackoff's thesis therefore self-contradictory? Is the answer to the question "Can a system be broken down into parts?" therefore perhaps "No, but we have no choice but to try it if we want better to understand the system"?
In particular, what does this mean for another Ackoff thesis like "if each part is managed well, the whole will be."? For M. Rubin, not only analysis and synthesis play a role here. Both have to be complemented by evaluation, in which the justified expectations that have arisen from a system description are compared with the experienced results, which closes the circle of system descriptions to an evolving dynamic that is confronted with a reality that is also evolving.
We had already analysed this subdivision in more detail a year ago in the seminar, see [Graebe/Kleemann 2020], and exposed the roots of such a subdivision in the history of ideas. Briefly speaking, they consist in the fact that for 400 years, with the gradual transition from scholasticism to an experimentally based understanding of science, the successes of an initially mechanically based technology became the basis of generalised scientific world views. Attempts to explain biological phenomena mechanistically quickly came up against limitations. The first major critique of such explanations is certainly Offray's "Man a Machine" [Offray], even though such explanatory approaches are still widely used today, not least in certain explanatory approaches in the Human Brain Project or in the field of AI, when their mechanical constructs are now finally supposed to obtain a "divine spark" of intelligence breathed into them thanks to advances in computer technology.
Criticism led as early as in the 18th century to the demarcation of (technologically accessible) mechanical systems from (technologically inaccessible) organismic ones. With the further development of chemistry (from phlogiston to modern analytical methods, which would not have been possible without the developments of physics and precision mechanical technologies based on it) and biology (from a theory of the development of species according to Darwin and Haeckel to modern molecular genetic methods, which in turn would not have been possible without those scientific and technological developments in chemistry), lines of tradition have shifted here, but the qualitative picture has not changed.
The concept of social systems in its diversity as socio-technical, socio-economic, socio-cultural and socio-ecological systems is, however, new and relatively recent in this phalanx of broader reflection, although already clearly articulated and developed in a relatively strong materialist reading in Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx/Engels. Its breakthrough is also linked to the cybernetics debate of the 1960s and more complex approaches to control circuits, which have since been investigated in greater mathematical detail. The properties of systems discovered in that research process (up to the "strange attractors" discussed in the lecture) revealed extremely complicated forms of progression of systems, which can be described deterministically by simple differential equations. This showed that classical mechanistic approaches can only be exploited to adequately describe a very small section of reality. These argumentations and insights influenced even political writings such as the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" (1972) or the demand for a "new political thinking" (Gorbachev 1987), but resulted also in the demand for a new thinking in science as a transition "from the materialistic-mechanistic worldview to a mental-vital cosmos" (Potsdam Manifesto 2005, there also the demand "We have to learn to think in a new way.“ The latter goes back to the politically motivated Einstein-Russell Manifesto 1955) up to practical approaches of an Open Culture (open source, software ecosystems, energy ecosystems, models of distributed autonomous agents, etc.). It remains to be explored which qualitatively new approaches are hidden behind such thought figures.
- Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Perestroika and new thinking for our country and the world. Moscow, 1987.
- Hans-Gert Gräbe, Ken Kleemann. Seminar Systemtheorie, Universität Leipzig, Wintersemester 2019/20. Rohrbacher Manuskripte, Heft 22. LIFIS, Berlin 2020. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-748430
- Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Man a Machine. First published 1747.
- Potsdam Manifesto (2005). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Denkschrift
- Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. (Dialog mit der Natur). Piper, München 1981.
- Karl Steinbuch. The Informed Society. History and Future of Telecommunications. (Die informierte Gesellschaft). Stuttgart 1966.
- Karl Steinbuch. Machine and Man. On the way to a cybernetic anthropology. (Automat und Mensch). Springer, Berlin 1971.
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Kleemann : For the discussion:
- Firstly, the problem of transferring biological categories to system considerations.
- Secondly, the problem of purpose itself: evolution is not optimisation.
- Optimisation is a process within a static environment. It is hard to apply that idea in system's research, but is possible in situations where it is a justified expectation that (for the special purposes of description) the context can be considered to be static.
- Thirdly, pattern formation in chaotic systems as non-goal-directed developments.
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Veronika Heuten : Can we talk again about open and closed systems? Why is an organic system open?
- Together with Shchedrovitsky's thesis "Only systems in motion can be managed" there are no closed systems - any system requires a throughput of energy and matter (and possibly information) to keep its forms of motion running and only motion leads to selfreprodution of structures of the system. Even a car has to be refueled and must be maintained regularly. Considering a system as closed is nevertheless a means of abstraction in the process of "reduction to the essentials" in the mode of system's description following a certain purpose.
- Daniel Werner : Analogous to thermodynamics: Just as a perpetuum mobile (closed system without energy exchange with the environment) is impossible to realise, according to Shchedrowitsky, management without movement is also impossible.
Graebe, Hans-Gert :
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Is there a "holistic approach" or is every "holistic" approach also reductionist?
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"The brain" - works like that (transformation of sense information, reduction of complexity, recombination with memory elements to form a selective whole, which also depends significantly on the previous history) in all cases (hearing, seeing ...), but does that have anything to do with a systemic approach or rather with context embedding? Or are they synonymous?
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Ackoff's concept of system is largely the same as TRIZ's, but he looks "from the inside out", while TRIZ (and engineers) look "from the outside in"?
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Shchedrovitsky distinguishes "constructed" systems and "living" systems, but his approach is different - as soon as a constructed system is put into operation, then it turns into a living system, and the system parameters, up to and including the "purpose" (Ackoff), may seriously change.
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Definition of "management" - how does this fit with Shchedrovitsky's approach? Especially his sentence "You can only manage something that is in motion".
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View of (entrepreneurial) system as "mechanical", "organismic", "social" runs parallel to the unfolding of both technology and capitalist forms of enterprise. What are the causal relations? What was first, "thinking organismically" (in a modern understanding) or "creating stock corporations"? And how is the turn to "social" to be understood? New socio-economic forms? Is this driven by the (also investive) economic demands of technology?
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How are the concepts "enterprise as a social system", "technical ecosystems" and the increasingly important concept of "socio-ecological systems" related to each other?
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What does the (by Ackoff) higher valued intervention of the government mean under these new conditions of production? This is in complete contradiction to neoliberal concepts that were dominant for at least 40 years after Ackoff's (1972) writings.
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Analysis - Synthesis. With M. Rubin: analysis - synthesis - evaluation as a triangle. Rubin sees this as a cycle A -> S -> E -> A ... However, analysis and synthesis are understood differently there, not analysis = from the whole to the parts, synthesis = from the parts to the whole, but in both cases it is about the same system.
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Kleemann : that's ok: purpose as cooperative organisational interaction.
- We discussed where "purpose" comes from (Purpose as the reason why a system exists).
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Daniel Werner : So Ackoff or the theory (from the 1970s) is only a child of his time. At that time Darwinism was still a contemporary view of evolution.
- We discussed the notion of evolution.
- Kleemann : clearly no reproach in this sense. Yes it is a child of its time, but today we know that biological reproduction is no unfolding of blueprints, but adaptation, selection, mutation; organism does not develop in environment, but reciprocally; accordingly chaotic movement and nevertheless pattern formation are not linear, therefore other conception of system (submersive vs. immersive system notion as explained in the lecture) are needed, and other management methods - flexible, mobile and flat hierarchicies.
- Kleemann : Dennett once said it nicely: the classical conception is a trickle down, evolution and chaos theory are bubbling up.
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There was a discussion about the relation of "social systems" and "public ownership". It deserves further discussion what it means for a society which is founded on private ownership to unfold cooperative action. Questions of the divergence of ownership and management functions must be considered here, as well as supra-personal legal forms of ownership (§§ 21 cont. BGB).
- Graebe, Hans-Gert : What is "public ownership"?
- Graebe, Hans-Gert : Who makes decisions in companies? Management or
owners?
- It is an illusion to argue that one can influence corporate policy with less than 1% of the shares via the shareholders' meeting. That such (independent) influence is possible at all contradicts the postulated emergent property of the primary system function. In this understanding, influence can only be exercised through a symbiotic relationship with the system as a whole. Management cannot be conceptualized in a cheaper way, at least based on the understanding of a system developed so far in the seminar.