Learning log 6 - Be adaptive

For this learnig log, I focused on two articles: (1) “A Brief Guide To Interactive Planning And Idealized Design” by Russell L. Ackoff (2001) and, “Peripheral Vision: Sensing and Acting on Weak Signals Making Meaning out of Apparent Noise: The Need for a New Managerial Framework” by Stephan H. Haeckel (2004)

Both are interesting readings about managerial and planning methods. However, the contrast between them is incredible.

Let me briefly summarize them. The older article, by Ackoff (2001), talks about three different ways of planning. The first one, a bottom-up approach, which he calls “Reactive Planning”, is focused upon problem solving. It identifies a problem and responds to it seeing an issue through its parts, regardless of the relation between them. The second one he defines as “Preactive planning”, which focus upon forecasting future scenarios and plan for this desired future. The third one, which he claims to be the best one, is the “Interactive planning”, where the focus is to “project the future” (Ackoff 2001), to project the desired scenario and do what is needed to reach it. He defines the parts and steps of this Interactive Planning, where “adaptability” is the key characteristic, as he said “ (in interactive planning) plans are treated as, at best, still photographs taken from a motion picture”.

However, in the more recent article, by Haeckel, the author talks about a change needed in the method of doing business. He states that companies should change from a “make-and-sell” approach, to a “sense-and-respond” method that, is his opinion, is a way to have an adaptive company.

The contrast between the articles is that the “sense and respond” approach described in the second is strongly aligned with the “reactive planning” attacked by Ackoff in his article.

That brings me again to a continuation of last week’s thoughts when I asked if a research method could ever be unbiased. Now the doubt is about the researcher work. There are many people working as researches, creating new “best solutions” that, as in this case, could be the “updated copy” of old ones. I believe that for each issue, there is not only one right answer, but many. However, if 98% of research results stay only amount the researches, what is the new best way of researching? Are we spending precious time on thinking, talking while we could be acting?