Russell Ackoff

Russell L. Ackoff, Ackoff's best, 1999                                      [ ]

counter measure

pp.74-75

There is a technique developed by the military either to beat a system or to design a system that would be difficult to beat. It consists of forming a "countermeasure team" to represent those who want to beat the system--the enemy, in the military case. This team is given all the information available to the good guys, including tentative designs of the system involved. The task of the counter-measure team is to develop ways of beating the system. When it has determined how to do so, the good guys are given this information to use in redesigning their system. After they have done so, the counter-measure team goes at it again. This process continue until the enemy either cannot find an effective counter-measure, or the time required to do so is long enough to justify introduction of the system. The idea behind this procedure is that when a team of intelligent people who have perfect information about a system--something real enemies seldom have--can no longer beat that system quickly enough to make it valueless, that system can be built with little chance of its being beaten.

     Note that such a procedure does not reduce the number of choices available to the enemy, but does reduce their effectiveness. For example, a major national accounting firm once employed the research group of which I was a part to find effective ways of embezzling money from banks so that it could improve its auditing procedures. We found better ways of embezzling than the auditors had dreamed of, but we were able to design new auditing procedures that made our discoveries ineffective. Much to our amazement, the accounting-auditing firm did not adopt these procedures, which were approved by the profession, they could not be held legally responsible for thefts they failed to detect. However, if they departed from standardized procedures and failed to detect an embezzlement, they would be legally liable for it. They chose to minimize their risks rather than those of their clients.

     In another case, a company that wanted to buy a factory from one of its minor competitors that was going out of business knew that its major competitor was anxious to prevent such a purchase. Acquisition of that factory would increase the competitiveness of the purchaser in a region in which the principal competitor had an advantage. The would-be purchaser employed the research group of which I was a part to act as a counter-measure team while an internal group developed a strategy for obtaining the factory. It took four iterations of the internal group developing an offer and our counter-measure team developing a way of obstructing it before we could no longer find a way of preventing the purchase. Subsequently, when the offer to purchase was made, the principal competitor followed exactly the steps the counter-measure team had taken. The would-be purchaser got the plant.

     A smart system can use knowlege of how it can be beat to redesign itself to reduce or eliminate that kind of beating.

   (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.74-75.)

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Russell L. Ackoff, Ackoff's best, 1999                                      [ ]

predicting the future and preparing for it (PtFaPfI)

pp.325-326

     . . . .. : the type of model employed in OR (Operations Research) implies a particular paradigm of problem solving. It consists of two parts:

   (1) predicting the future and 

   (2) preparing for it.

Clearly, the effectiveness of this approach depends critically on the accuracy with which the future can be predicted. It helps us a little, and may harm us much, to prepare perfectly for an imperfectly-predicted future.

     Therefore, the paradigm of OR should be one that involves “designing a desirable future and inventing ways of bringing it about.” The future depends at least as much on what we and others do between now and then as it does on what has already happened. Therefore, we can affect it, and by collaboration with others--expanding the system to be controlled--we can increase our chances of “making it happen.” The wider the collaboration, the more closely we can approximate the future we have jointly designed. It is this perception by Fred Emery and Eric Trist that gave rise to their work in social ecology.

     Prediction and preparation were the principal modalities of the Machine Age: design and invention are emerging as the principal modalities of the System Age. Prediction and preparation involve passive adaptation to an environment that is believed to be out of our control. Design and invention involve active control of a system's environment as well as the system itself.

     The models currently employed by OR are evaluative in nature; they enable us to compare alternative decisions or decision rules that are “given.” In design and invention, however, the alternatives are “taken,” created. Creative solutions to problems are not ones obtained by selecting the best from among a well- or widely-recognized set of alternatives, but rather by finding or producting a new alternative. Such an alternative is frequently so superior to any of those previously perceived that formal evaluation is not required. If it is, however, then the evaluative models of OR may have a use. The challenge, therefore, is not so much to improve our methods of evaluation, but to improve our methods of design and invention.

     The point of the views I have expressed up to this point is not that OR's concept of problem solving is useless, but that it should have been taken as a starting-point of OR's development, not as its end-point. To have taken it as the end-point was to have aborted OR's development and to have initiated its retreat from reality. 

   (Ackoff's best : his classic writings on management, Russell L. Ackoff., © 1999, pp.325-326.)

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