Learning, Systems and Improvement
Posted on February 6, 2006 Comments (3)
A Major Mistake That Managers Make by Russell L. Ackoff
Once again Ackoff provides great ideas:
Page 4 and 5 explore the method to effectively learn from decisions the organization makes. The idea seem simple but they are powerful.
• The justification for the decision including its expected effects and the time by which they are expected…
• The assumptions on which the expectations are based…
• The information, knowledge, and understanding that went into the decision.
• Who made the decision, how it was made, and when…
The decision should be monitored to determine whether the expectations are being met and the assumptions on which they are based remain valid.
When a deviation is found in either the assumptions or expectations, it should be diagnosed, the cause determined and corrective action prescribed and taken.
The corrective action is itself the result of a decision. A record of this decision should be made and treated as the original decision. In this way the process can not only yield learning but also learning how to learn.
A record of the entire process (all four steps) should be made and stored for easy access by those who may later be confronted by the need to make a similar type of decision.
More articles and books by Russell Ackoff
3 Responses to “Learning, Systems and Improvement”
Leave a Reply
RSS Feed
November 11th, 2006 @ 9:36 am
Tom also discussed the PDSA cycle (he co-authored the best book on applying the PDSA to improve: The Improvement Guide). One point he made was that he often finds that organizations fail to properly “turn” the PDSA cycle (by running through it 5-15 times quickly and instead to one huge run through the PDSA cycle). One slow turn is much less effective then using it as intended to quickly test and adapt and test and adapt…
August 11th, 2008 @ 1:03 pm
We tend to overreact to variation. Therefore we tend to tamper with systems which actually increases variation and reduces performance…
March 7th, 2011 @ 2:43 pm
[...] theories) that is slowing learning. People are very reluctant to make errors of commission (and errors of commission due to a change is avoided even more). This reluctance obviously makes learning (and improvement) more difficult. And the reluctance is [...]