Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the inherent value of design as the primary underlying matrix of life. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. In 1971, designer and educator Victor Papanek wrote: вЂњAll men are designers. Additionally, many organizations are cited as examples of companies promoting a design thinking culture (for example, P&G). Even Taylorism was considered a new design philosophy in the early 20th century! Currently, many contrasting concepts of the design process and what makes someone a designer exist. Design philosophy has its roots in Egyptian and Mesopotamian bureaucracies. But design in management is not something new. In recent years, a great interest in вЂњdesign thinkingвЂќ has developed. Ackoff suggested that, for this reason, many performance-improvement initiatives fail and actually throw fuel on the fires they seek to extinguish.

Often, these new problems are much worse than those addressed initially. Otherwise, unintended consequences may emerge as changes made within one part of the system may adversely affect other parts. With systems thinking, managers and designers learn how the parts of their organization interact, not how they perform independently. Shift away from assuming that only вЂњcreative typesвЂќ can contribute to innovation to knowing that everyone in your group can do so. Failing to consider the systemic properties as derived from the interaction of the parts leads to sub-optimization of the performance of the whole. A system involves an interconnected complex of functionally related components.

Regardless of the approach, the essence of systems thinking is encapsulated in the concept of systemic wholeness, which is grasped by looking at the whole instead of the parts. Many methodologies are derived from the systems thinking worldview, including interactive planning, soft systems thinking, and system dynamics. According to Russell Ackoff, analysis is useful for revealing how a system works, but synthesis reveals why a system works the way it does. Systems thinking replaces reductionism (the belief that everything can be reduced to individual parts) with expansionism (the belief that a system is always a sub-system of some larger system), and analysis (gaining knowledge of the system by understanding its parts) with synthesis (explaining its role in the larger system of which it is a part). That lens determines what you see and often influences what you do about it. It is a lens through which you can look at the world. Richard Mattessich wrote that вЂњsystems thinking is first and foremost a point of view and a methodology arising out of this viewpointвЂќ (, вЂњThe systems approach: Its variety of aspects,вЂќ Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 33(6), 1982). As readers of this newsletter are aware, systems thinking is evolving as an alternative to the old paradigms.

System lens russell ackoff cliffnotes