August 11, 2006, 9:46 am
Reverse-Engineering Utopia
by Lisa Agustin
Filed under: Books and Articles, Business, Technology
It’s time to catch up on summer reading. The Knowledge@Wharton site offers an excerpt from Idealized Design: How to Solve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today, in which authors Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson, and Herbert J. Addison propose what seems to be a simple idea: “the way to get the best outcome is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today.” According to the authors, this “ensures that you do not erect imaginary obstacles before you even know what the ideal is.”
The book is based on the collective experiences of the authors. Ackoff’s seminal experience began on a side trip he took in 1951 to visit an acquaintance at Bell Labs. While there, he inadvertently became part of an all-hands meeting called to innovate the telephone communications system–a system that had not introduced a revolutionary contribution since 1900.
Tasked with improving the system as a whole rather than its individual parts, the six sub-system teams were instructed to design whatever integrated system they wanted, subject to only two constraints: technological feasibility and operational viability.
Interestingly, Ackoff noted that after his involvement ended and these design teams continued their work:
They anticipated every change in the telephone system, except two, that has appeared since then. Among these are touch-tone phones, consumer ownership of phones, call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail, caller ID, conference calls, speaker phones, speed dialing of numbers in memory, and mobile phones. They did not anticipate photography by the phone or an Internet connection.
Ackoff’s description of how the teams approached this challenging task contained two elements worth noting: an early phase of analyzing existing system problems and establishing users’ needs or requirements, and then working with each sub-system team to get a better understanding of how suggested improvements would impact the larger system. Above all, this approach reveals that creative thinking combined with a rigorous analytical process can result in big changes.
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