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"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to" said the cat.

"I don’t much care where-" said Alice.

Then it doesn't matter which way you go", said the cat.

From "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" Lewis Carroll (1865)

Re-Think

"We can not solve the problems we face today with the same thinkng we used to create them" - Albert Einstein

 

Re-Thinking our concept of Business

Unless we re-think our concept of business our attempts at improvement will often be short-sighted and the results will be limited.

We have become very competent at using the scientific method and analytical tools for solving problems. Yet for all of this we feel less and less able to reach our goals. Why is this?

Because our businesses are systems. Our business problems do not exist in isolation but, as an inter-dependent system of problems, a mess.

The natural world gives us insight to how systems function. In the video below David Suzuki eloquently explains inter-dependent systems by examining the relationship between salmon and rainforest.

©2009 Sense of Wonder Productions LLC

The way each element of a system behaves, and the effect it has on the whole, depends on what at least one other element is doing. Because of this we can not hope to reach our goals using problem solving alone, we also need  "mess management".

The most powerful method we know of for managing the mess is Interactive Planning  as developed by Dr Russ Ackoff.