Dr. Russell Ackoff: The fallacy of trying to improve parts of a system in isolation

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The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how they act taken separately.

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This is so cool !! I was reading something about assembling team of super-stars at one of FAANG company and how the performance of the team was so poor. I think this explains it.

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There are so many applications of this:

  • individuals vs. a team
  • disciplines (electrical, mechanical, software, manufacturing, security, marketing, sales, etc.) vs. the product
  • instances in a distributed system vs. the whole system
  • threads vs. the application

The important task of an architect or manager is integration.

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One of my past jobs was at a startup that contained a group of hand-picked individuals from a much larger organization – an exceptionally talented group of people. Early on, someone commented: with this group of talent, this can’t possibly fail? But it did. One of the reasons was that the parts did not fit.

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Idealized Design, Systems Thinking, and a Model for Outlier Innovation, by Dr. Russell Ackoff

While a lot of my thinking focuses on process and incremental improvements, there are times when you have to start fresh.

In this video, Russell describes a situation at Bell Labs where a VP dramatically reset the team working on the telephone.

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“Idealized design” - Everybody in org can participate, there is no concept of experts, amazing insight.

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