A Lifetime of Systems Thinking

At 80, organisational theorist Russell Ackoff — one of the founders of the systems-thinking and operations-research traditions — looks back on a lifetime of work. He opens by mocking the assumption that wisdom increases with age and then offers a distilled account of the principles he came to trust: that problems exist in systems and not in events, that improvement is rarely additive, that messes (interacting clusters of problems) cannot be solved by analysing one problem at a time, and that the work of a manager is to design the system, not to optimise the parts.