🚗🎬 If Russ Ackoff had given a TED Talk

Twelve minutes of an old professor of systems at a lectern in 1994, uploaded years later under a title that explains itself. I have sent it to more colleagues than any book. Watched again on the first Saturday of February with 📕 The Goal half read on the sofa arm.

The argument, in my words

1. A system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts. What it is comes from how the parts work together, not from what each does alone.
2. So take the best engine from one make of car, the best gearbox from another, the best brakes from a third, and bolt them together. You do not get the best car. You do not get a car. The parts do not fit.
3. Therefore improving each part separately does not improve the whole, and often makes it worse.
4. Most improvement programmes aim at defects: getting rid of what you do not want. Getting rid of what you do not want does not give you what you do want.
5. And the line I came back for: there is a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. If the thing is wrong, doing it better makes you wronger. It is better to do the right thing badly, because then at least you learn something.

This is the short way into 💎 Local efficiency can lower the output of the whole, and it sits at the top of 01. 🔁 Systems & Feedback because nobody refuses twelve minutes.

Sent To

• 22 October. Zainab Karimi, after Gideon objected to the scorecard weighting. Her reply was one word: wronger.
• 14 May. The merged team, in the channel, two days into the new structure. Greta watched it. I know because she quoted the car.
• 13 February. Sam Okoye, the morning after the go or no-go, in place of an explanation I did not have the energy to give.