Steven Brant
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2025
12:19 · 306K views · Oct 23, 2010
A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.
HN favors it as a compact, quotable management and systems-thinking talk, often cited for doing the right thing versus doing the wrong thing right.
5 comments from Hacker News
Thanks for the suggestion, how does what he says stack up against those who came after, I ask this because this is one of my favourite management talks by Russell Ackoff [1] and he mentions Dr Deming so assume he was influenced by/worked/studied with him and given their relative ages wondered if his work might be valuable to start with? [1] this video
I think the article is right. Vaclav Smil has pointed out that today the share of fossil fuels, at about 90% of global energy consumed[1] is actually higher than in 2000, and falling at a snails pace. There is a worrying trend emerging, fuelled by the tech industry of performative environmentalism that seeks to promise absolution like the church did by buying Tesla's and biodegradable cups while the real-world impact is marginal while leaving the fundamental flaws of the system untouched. We won't consume ourselves out of the doghouse. Russ Ackoff in a great talk about systems thinking[2] once pointed out a few salient things 1. Counter to intuition one does not improve a system by merely removing deficiencies. Doing away with what you don't want doesn't get you what you want. 2. Incrementalism doesn't solve fundamentally new problems, rearranging deck chairs on the titanic is pointless, and people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong. 3. One must recognise that like an architect, a designer does not design rooms independently of the house. One starts with the house, and only changes parts as to improve the overall functioning of the system, never the parts alone. This is what needs to be applied to modern environmentalism. Woke green consumerism and tech worship is useless. The entire global system needs to be redesigned, instead of trying to fix individual parts. We need to think in holistic terms rathe
This quote “You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.” reminds me of a Systems Thinking talk Russell Ackoff gave a long time ago [1] where he talks about the difference between doing "the right thing wrong" and the "wrong thing right" and getting more efficient at doing the wrong thing obviously might not be optimal :). This is actually a concept that Peter Drucker came up with, but I've not managed to find a good link to that, I'd be interested if anyone has? The whole talk is quite interesting, but I've linked to the relevant segment: [1] this video
"Continuous improvement isn't nearly as important as discontinuous improvement. Creativity is a discontinuity. A creative act breaks with the chain that has come before it. It's not continuous. One never becomes a leader by continuously improving -- that's imitation of the leader. You never become a leader by imitating them and improving slightly. You only become a leader by leapfrogging those who are ahead of you. And that comes about through creativity." -- Russ Ackoff this video
> It's amazing how fast the code goes when you know exactly what you want. To quote Russ Ackoff[1]: > Improving a system requires knowing what you could do if you could do whatever you wanted to. Because if you don't know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how on earth are you going to know what you can do under constraints? [1] this video