Improvement is a Puzzle

I was listening to a podcast of a talk given by Russell Ackoff today and he talked about the difference between a problem and a puzzle. It is not about difficulty or anything obvious like that. The difference, Ackoff said, was that unlike a problem, there is something in a puzzle that means you have to change an assumption you have about it before you can solve it. (If you take this literally then they should be called "jigsaw problems" instead!) We've all done those puzzles where in order to solve them you have to change your thinking.

Which made me think that redesigning a system is a puzzle, not a problem because you have to change more than one assumption about how your organisation works.

The other interesting thing he talked about was the difference between analysis and synthesis. Analysis is where you take something that needs improving, fixing or understanding and you take it apart, examine (and perhaps improve) the parts then put it back together. With synthesis you start by understanding the bigger system that the system you are studying sits in.

He said that there are always important things about a system that you can only understand by synthesis and will never understand by analysis. For example, why do cars drive on the left in the UK? You may get an answer by looking at the history of transportation and the transportation system in general, but you will never get an answer by taking a car to pieces.

Similarly, you can juggle the internal processes of an organisation as much as you like, but if the barrier to improvement is in customer demand or in externally imposed targets or regulation, you need to look at the wider system and not just inside the organisation to understand these things.

Best,

Rob