Russ Ackoff ’s Parable

The colleagues in the analytics group had been enjoying their lunchtime conversation one fall Friday afternoon when one of them, Bruce, an OR/MS analyst, asked, “Say, did you see the news that Russ Ackoff died last week? Another giant of the profession is no longer with us.”

Most of them knew who Russ Ackoff was. For the few who didn’t, Bruce recounted a bit of Professor Ackoff’s career, from early success as a practitioner through two different stints at the University of Pennsylvania, first at Wharton and later as the grand eminence of the Ackoff Center for the Advancement of System Approaches (ACASA) in the engineering school, with a term as one of the early presidents of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA), all the while continuing to serve a “Who’s Who” of clients in big corporations.

“He certainly sounds impressive,” one of the younger analysts acknowledged. “What was he like in person?’

“Warm, friendly, good sense of humor, easily approachable, helpful,” Alan, another of the older OR/MS analysts, replied. “But not much tolerance for what he thought was BS or pretension. Did you see the column in OR/MS Today (www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-6-09/froracle.html) a few issues ago about the young analyst who got sent to New York City to study why elevators in this one building took so long to arrive, and wound up reducing the complaints a whole lot without changing the elevators’ performance at all, just by recommending that they install mirrors in the lobby? Well, as the column said, nobody now knows who that guy was, but some people think he might have been one of Russ Ackoff’s students. That’s certainly the kind of ‘focus on the client, don’t get all wrapped up in trying to be mathematically innovative’ approach Russ would have favored.”

“Not big on math, huh?” another of the younger analysts inquired.

“Oh, he could do math just fine,” Alan replied. “The point, though, was that math is a very useful tool for some problems but might not be required for others, and if you put too much emphasis on technical brilliance you could end up losing the focus on the client. And then, Russ predicted, we’d all end up being pushed further and further down in the organizations we serve, from the senior management’s inner circle to a separate quantitative group reporting to one of those senior people to an even more specialized group even deeper down and further removed from the major decisions. Professor Ackoff wrote three different articles for major OR/MS publications, at 10-year intervals, predicting the imminent demise of the profession for just that reason.”

“We’re still here,” the younger analyst noted dryly.

“Yes,” Alan conceded, “and one time I actually got to meet him in person and kidded him about it. I asked him, ‘How much confidence would you have in the medical judgment of a physician who pronounced the same patient dead three times, at 10-year intervals?’ ”

“And how did he react?” Bruce gaped, as if he wondered why Alan had not been struck down by a thunderbolt on the spot.

“He laughed,” Alan said, “But then he told me, ‘Look, if you listen to the plenary speeches at any national meeting of our societies, you hear people lamenting the profession’s loss of visibility and influence, much as I predicted. Whether it’s dead or just mortally wounded is less important than whether it’s going more or less the way I feared, and I still think it is.’ Frankly, I have been listening to the plenary speeches, and I can definitely see his point.”

“He definitely knew well how organizations work,” Bruce chimed in. “His books about where and how decisions get made and how to influence them, how to approach problem-solving and how to beat the system didn’t have much math, but they did contain lots of profound management science, in the broad sense of the term. He knew how decisions get stuck or go wrong and what to do about it, and isn’t that what management science is supposed to mean? I’d have to agree that we as a profession have moved away from that and have suffered because of it.”

“Are you ever right!” Alan resumed. “Russ Ackoff understood the whole situation even better than he usually let on. Fortunately, there are still some OR/MS analysts like him, who do stay focused on solving the client’s problem, and those practitioners keep the whole profession viable! And after the comment about the plenary speeches, he added, ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret. The more the theoreticians dislike me, the more my clients love me.’ I didn’t really get what he was saying at the time, but now I think I do. I think his consulting practice actually increased when the theoreticians at Wharton and in the profession in general started openly and harshly criticizing him. High-level decision-makers know pretty well what OR/MS analysts do, and which way the profession has been going, and they’re frustrated about it. When they see someone like Russ Ackoff who’s willing to take on the whole profession for being too theoretical and too focused on seeking complicated solutions to show how smart we are, and losing the emphasis on identifying what the clients really need, they say, ‘Aha! Here’s a guy who has the analytical skills but also really gets what we’re about, and isn’t afraid to state the truth.’ Having some of the people who clearly don’t get it sniping at you may actually help you gain clients’ confidence.

As I think we’ve all agreed, the guy was really good!”