Systems Thinking Speech by Dr. Russell Ackoff

After one of my books appeared and a student came in he said Professor I just read your new book he said it's very good contains a lot more than you know um that's true so I'm going in free willing I'm going to pick and choose from some of the things I said yesterday perhaps the most insulting part and to use today and my remarks have two foundations two ideas out of which they Spring so let me deal with those first first is the concept of systems and what systems thinking implies a system is a whole

that contains two or more parts Each of which can affect the properties or behavior of the whole for example you are a system a biological system called an organism and you have Parts like your heart's stomach lungs pancreas and so on each of which can affect your properties and your Behavior the second requirement of the parts of a system is that none of them has an independent effect on the hole how any part affects the hole depends on what other parts are doing so the way your heart affects you depends on the behavior of the

lungs the brain and so on the parts are all interconnected between any two parts of a system there's a direct or an indect direct Path and finally if you group the parts of a system in the subgroups no matter how you subgroup them each subgroup will have an effect on the properties and the behavior of the whole and none will have an independent effect and therefore you can summarize those three characteristics of a system into a simple statement a system as a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts now this has a number of

Consequences which are not apparent but are incredibly important the first is the essential properties of any system derive out of how its parts interact not on how they act taken separately and therefore the defining properties of any system are properties of the whole which none of its parts have for example an automobile is a mechanical system and its essential property is its ability to carry you From one place to to another but no part of it can do that there's no part of an automobile it's motor its body its seats that can carry you from

one place to another it's only the automobile taken as a whole your essential property is life there's no part of you which separately lives life is a property of the whole and therefore when the hole is disassembled it loses its essential Properties and so do all of its parts if we were to bring an automobile into this room and disassemble it but retain every part in the room we would not have an automobile what you have is a collection of the parts because the automobile is the product of the interaction of its parts not the

sum of the parts taken separately and this has an incredibly important implication to management which the Western world has not yet Learned and as a respons for the well documented decline of the West in any system when one improves the performance of the parts taken separately the performance of the whole does not necessarily improve and frequently gets worse the basic principle of management used in the western world is divide and conquer if it's a corporation you're dividing the production marketing Finance personnel and so on if it's a un University to break up in the Department's

curricula and programs and then try to manage each one as well as possible on the assumption that when this is done the hole will be run as well as possible and that's absolutely false because when a system is operating as well as possible none of its parts may be now this can be proven rigorously in the system Sciences but I'll spare you That proof for one thing I don't remember it but there's a simple example that'll show you that it's true and why according to the New York Times there are 457 different automobiles available in

the United States so imagine with me that we buy one of each and bring them into a huge garage and then get 200 of the best automotive engineers in the world to come in and we give them the problem of finding which Car has the best motor suppose they come out and tell us the Rolls-Royce has the best engine and we make note of it and then say please find out which one has the best transmission tell us the Mercedes has the best transmission well which one has the best fuel injector well perhaps it's the

Volkswagen and one by one we take every part required for an automobile and find out which is the best one available when that list is complete we Return it to the engineers and instruct them to remove those parts from those cars and put them together into the best possible automobile because now we will have an automobile consisting of all the best available parts do we get the best possible automobile of course not you don't even get an automobile why not the parts don't fit it's the way the parts fit together to determine the performance of

a system Not on how they perform taken separately but we conduct systems like the university and corporations and hospitals as though the Improvement of the parts they can separately will improve the whole now that's one Foundation concept I'm going to use in talking about education the other one deres from a failure of our educational system to distinguish between the various forms of content of the Mind the simplest form of content of the Mind consists of data now there's an old aphorism that you may not have heard since there not what widely circulated among Educators goes

as follows an ounce of information is worth a pound of data an ounce of knowledge is worth a pound of information an ounce of understanding is worth a pound of knowledge and an ounce of wisdom is Worth a pound of understanding so we have a hierarchy of the content of Mind data information knowledge understanding and wisdom of increasing importance as you approach wisdom but the allocation of time in the educational system is inversely related to the importance of these contents most of the time is devoted to transmission of information and some to knowledge nothing to

understanding and of course none to wisdom at all some Have claimed that this is due to the fact you can't transmit what you don't [Music] have data consists of symbols which represent the properties of objects and events so if I asked each of you what your address is or how old you are how many children you have all of this would constitute data data are like iron or I can't do anything with them until they've been Processed converted into iron information is iron it's data which had been processed to be useful and useful information is

what is contained in descriptions description is the mode of transmission of information It's contained in the answer to questions to begin with such words as who where when what and how many so if somebody were to enter the campus and say where is a convocation occurring Today they tell them in the auditorium that's descriptive that's information if they say how do I get there they will receive instruction and the content of instruction is knowledge its product is skill knowledge is contained in how to questions understanding is contained in explanations answers the questions to begin with

the word why why in a world you want to go to the convocation an answer to that explains The desire to get here now wisdom is a qualitative change from the previous four data information knowledge and understanding are all concerned with increasing the efficiency with which we pursue our ends but they don't tell us anything about the ends that are being pursued they're in a sense value free wisdom makes a transition between efficiency and Effectiveness because it Evaluates the the pursuit the end which we're pursuing efficiently it's contained the distinction is contained in a wonderful

statement by Peter Ducker who once said there's a big difference between doing things right and doing the right thing you see we are very largely devoted to doing the wrong thing right that's very unfortunate because the wrer you do the wrong thing the wronger you Become when we do the right thing wrong we make a mistake which when detected allows us to improve so the distinction is absolutely critical and we are a society which are simply drowning in the pursuit of the efficiency concerned with the pursuit of the wrong ends one simple and obvious example

is our current concern with the health care System it isn't a Health Care System a moment's reflection will make it Apparent that it isn't a Health Care System what do the servers of the Health Care System get paid for they get paid for taking care of you when you're sick or disabled it's a sickness and disability care system not a Health Care system now if the income of the servers deres out of taking care of you when you're sick and disabled you can be damn sure they're going to keep you sick and disabled they're not

going to keep you Healthy if they did they'd be out of business now what they say and what they declare is irrelevant it's what they will do even if unconsciously because the system is so constructed to focus on the maintenance of sickness and disability the same thing is true of most organizations corporations are not about maximization of profit all one has to do is look at the Executive offices and the Way they move around and where they stay when they move around and see that it's not about maximizing profit it's about maximizing the comfort of

the senior Executives and the university is not about the education of students that's a myth which we perpetrate in order to get public support the principal purpose of a university is apparent when you try to explain Its Behavior is to provide his faculty with the quality of work life They want teaching is the price they have to pay and like any price we try to minimize [Music] it just look at the universities of the United States and the colleges and rank them from the best to the worst you can start wherever you want to Harvard

Stanford and someone work your way down at the Pica State teachers college and then plot the number of hours of Teaching per Academic Year the average hours of the faculty what do you find an incredibly strong correlation at Harvard they teach at most 5 hours a year but in some universities is 15 hours a semester or a quarter the implication is clear but we don't pay any attention to it the implication is the better the school is the less teaching there is you see the ideal school is one in which there's no Teaching but a

lot of learning and that's the First Fundamental myth about the educational system the myth is that a good way to learn something is to have it taught to you and that's absolutely false being taught is a major obstruction to learning now again any reflection will make this clear how did you learn your first language nobody taught it to you you learned it you learned to walk without Having it taught to you how to ride a bicycle how to talk all the essential things of life you learn without having them talk taught to you how many

of you ever learned a second language in school as well as you know your first language of course not if you want to learn a second language you go live in the country that speaks it you don't have it taught to you burlett never succeeded as well as living in a foreign country did teaching is an obstruction to Learning but there's a very important characteristic of teaching how many of you have ever taught a class in a subject you never had as a student I suspect most of you have who learned most in the classroom

although being taught is an obstruction to learning teaching is a marvelous way to learn what we are are professional Learners not Teachers a student once asked me what's the last time you taught a course in a subject that existed when you were a student I had to think about about it it was 1951 1951 it's more than 40 years ago everything I've taught since then didn't exist when I was a student student looked at me and said my God you've had to learn a lot he said I wish you could teach as well as you

can Learn that's what we ought to be about the facilitation of learning not teaching the university and the college is upside down the students ought to be teaching because that's a good way to learn and we ought to be continuously learning so that we can enable them to learn more effectively the principal purpose of an institution of Higher Learning ought to have two prongs to it first to enable students to learn how to Learn and secondly to motivate them to want to do so you see 50% of what you learn in a university is irrelevant

to what you're going to do later how many of you remember how to take a square root the other 50% will be obsolete within a couple years your success in life after leaving a university depends on your ability to learn in your job or in your activity What you need to know to do the job well your future depends on your capacity to learn and your motivation to do so motivation is absolutely critical we ignore it we almost deliberately design classes to demotivate students so that they don't want to learn we make a chore out

of it I told a story yesterday was of an experience I had that was really Illuminating to me my group at the university did a lot of collaborative work with a neighboring So-called black ghetto an area called mancho consisting of 80 city blocks with 22,000 people in it all black it was referred to in the city in the' 60s when we started working with him is the bottom it has since received 17 national awards for self-development effort it's been the subject of seven major national television programs and its leadership has received all kinds of recognition

one day its leaders came Into my office and said we got a problem and maybe you can help us with it we have too much ill literacy coming out of our schools about 80% of the students even coming out of high school they said are functionally illiterate what can we do about it we said we said why don't you get a hold of the Board of Education they have a special group working on the literacy problem they said we've already done That they came in and they didn't do us any good we said well we

don't know anything about something this some this product problem and they said well that's an advantage because the people who do can help us so why don't you try well we did know one thing about the community which turned out to be essential those kids were not stupid they were smart as a devil they weren't Educated but boy were they smart and therefore if they weren't learning how to read it's because they didn't want to so we conducted research to find out why did they not want to learn how to read well the results were

incredible 65% of the households in that area did not contain a book the kids coming to school had never seen an adult read their model adults were not reading people but talking people their culture Was oral not literary and then they come to school where a blond white woman tells them that reading is the most important thing in the world and they answer in two impolite words secondly we learned learned that when a young man reaches the age of 12 joining a gang was compulsory it was the only way he could survive physically by moving

around the neighborhood with friends that would help protect Him if on the other hand he was ever seen carrying a book he would be physically attacked even by members of his own gang because a book was referred to as Whitey thing it was capitulation to a dominating culture and so they didn't carry books around and they didn't read books at home and they didn't see people reading books at home and now we're trying to make them learn how to Read rap was not an invention of the whites or the blacks it's an oral culture well

what can we do about it when we had an idea and we fortunately had somebody who was willing to finance an effort to try it out Julius Rosenwald who was the son of the founder of Sears lives in Philadelphia and is an old friend so we approached him and he agreed to finance a very peculiar effort we bought a Complete set of Charlie Chaplain silent films put them in the auditorium of the schools in this neighborhood and played them during the entire school day and any child was allowed to come and sit in the auditorium

and watch Charlie Chaplain without an excuse from their teacher by the end of that semester every kid in the school could read why they wanted to read the subtitles they couldn't understand what was going on and they wanted to and so They learned and it wasn't taught to them they got motivated education has to focus on motivation what excites people well the great Spanish philosopher OTA Orga oset has a marvelous book called the mission of the university in which he traces the evolution of revolutions and he concludes that every major revolution in the world's history

was created by what he calls a mobilizing Idea ideas that excite people into action holy Grails of thought how much effort do we put into the production and dissemination of mobilizing ideas ideas that diverge from the normal you see universities and colleges and the public schools are largely devoted to maintaining the status quo not to producing change there is a very remarkable man floating around this country in England By the name of Edward debono Edward debono is responsible for the research that was initiated about two decades ago into the subject of creativity he got into

it in a very interesting way he had married and they had their first child and debono was fascinated by the development of his child and so it began to log everything you know if the child said ooh he recorded January the 4th the child said ooh when January the 5th he said ah and He put all this down and pretty soon he observed that the child demonstrated remarkable creativity he began to look at other children and discovered they were equally creative the creativity was not a sparse competence it was widely spread among children and then

he looked at adults and said oh my God what happened to them somewhere along the line people who are born with a creative capability lose It he said why well he never answered the question but two others did what he did is go on to prate create procedures for are revitalizing the remnants of creativity in adults they're called creativity enhancing procedures and he wrote a famous book called straight and lateral thinking in which he demonstrates some of those principles but Jules Henry an American Anthropologist wrote an incredible book Called culture against man and Ronald Lang

a prominent British psychiatrist who recently died wrote a book called the politics of experience and they dealt with the why question and they both came out with the same answer we do it in school we kill creativity when you are given an examination in school and you read the question what's the first thing that goes through the students mind they learn very quickly that the thing to do When you're given a question is to ask yourself a question what's the question you ask yourself what answer do they expect examinations are about trying to anticipate the

answers expected by the teacher expected answers cannot be creative because they're already known if we use examinations at all they ought to be about encouraging students to give us the unexpected answer because that's what creativity is About it's about surprise deviation from expectations and furthermore or as Jules Henry pointed out we don't even allow the students to ask the critical questions on their mind what's so good about monogamy what's so bad about premarital sex what's so hot about our economic system what's so good about democracy questions of this sort are not discussed with the kids

they're put aside they learn very quickly not to ask Important questions and not to provide important answers and we wonder where creativity goes It goes down the drain with Conformity to expectations of the faculty which simply reflect the expectations of society Jules Henry asked what would happen if we encourage kids to ask the so-called improper question and to provide improper answers he said we would be confronted With more creativity and Society has learned how to handle and that's our fear too much creativity as a result we have too little of it I once got very

tired of reading the handwriting of graduate students like many of you have I'm sure even with undergraduates so I came into a class the beginning of a session one year and said you're going to do a term paper and out of that paper I have to to Extract a Content I can't do it with your handwriting you're going to have to type your paper double space typing on 8 1/2 by 11 white sheets with at least 1 in margins and I want the pages numbered in the upper right hand corner is that absolutely clear and

they all nodded and said yes the end of that semester I received every paper typewritten as I had directed and they were legible but there Was one that I got that was typed this way at the end of the paper there was a little remark it said ahuh I got you didn't I my initial reaction was that damn kid knew what I wanted and deliberately wouldn't give it to me I was going to reject this paper and then I stopped and reflected and said my God look what he did he spent time trying to figure

out how to fool me how to surprise me he was Creative so I give him an A+ and I added a note don't ever try it again because it won't be creative the next time I have sat for years through faculty meetings there are two things I've learned about it one uh as a member of The Faculty of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania I was selected one year to be the Wharton representative on the faculty of the College of Engineering The town school and so for two years I had to sit in

town school meetings of the faculty they were even more boring than the Wharton School meetings and so having nothing else to do I try to record the subject matters discussed and the princi Concepts used in the discussion and in two years the word student was mentioned only once only once faculty meanss are about The faculty they're properly called they weren't about students they weren't about education learning they're about benefits and academic freedom and all this sort of stuff that affect the faculty schedules but not about students and I learned that the faculty operates on the

assumption that it knows what the students need to know and that's absolutely false you haven't the foggiest idea what students Need to know I sat while Engineers argued for hours about what courses ought to be required for a degree in engineering and they ignored the fact long known that 65% of The Graduate Engineers do not practice engineering within 5 years after graduation that 35% of the phds never practice in the field in which they reive their PHD a few years ago the American statistical Association One of the largest professional Societies in the United States had

a 100th anniversary and they did a very clever thing they solicited the membership with a ballot asking us to nominate the four people we would like most to address this at the 100th anniversary celebration to be held in New York now they got a whole bunch of names they took the names most Frequently mentioned made a second ballot and sent it out to get selection from that and they proceeded this is called a deli technique until they got it down to four speakers and those four were invited to address the hund celebration that was quite

a to-do it turned out that not one of the four who were selected by 15,000 members as the most important contrib iors to the development of Statistics in the United States not one of them had ever Had a course in statistics proving the obvious thing that changes in the field are never produced by experts but from Outsiders looking at the field how do we train people to look at things creatively and encourage them to do so rather than to act as is a combination of a computer a recording device and a video camera and simply

spill back to them what we've given to Them that's not human this is exemplified in the ultimate insult to human intelligence called computer assisted instruction what an insult I have a computer [Applause] to the idea of having a computer teach a person it's reversed right at the Hawkin School in Cleveland we did an experiment where we took second grade students and this was a day When computers were complicated univac 2 you had to program in machine language and we gave the second grade the responsibility for teaching the computer arithmetic and in one semester they learned

two years four semesters of elementary school arithmetic how did they learn it on their own and with help they use the teacher as a resource not as a teacher but as somebody would help them Learn Ellis Johnson a professor at Johns Hopkins University who moved to case Institute in the 1960s got an experimental Grant from the National Science Foundation and conducted a most unusual experiment he took 60 of the accepted in coming students to case Institute of Technology undergraduates and offered them a summer job prior to their entry to school they all accepted because he

offered a Generous salary they were put together in teams of five and they were given the real problem to work on and to work for somebody in the public institution or private who had the problem to solve so this was a realistic exercise for example one group was sent to Mayfield Heights Ohio to improve the water supply system because the pressure was running low from overuse of the existing system Another one was sent to another part of the Cleveland area to develop an emergency service for the new Expressway that was built through the area and

so on I was in Ellis's office one day when one of these groups came in working on the hydraulic problem it said uh Dr Johnson we've developed an equation to express the flow of water through this system we like to show it to you and see if it's right and they wrote it up on the board and he looked at it he said no He said that's that's right he said now here's our problem what we have to do is manipulate these two variables so as to maximize the output we don't know how to do

that is it possible to do it he said yeah I said that's a problem in differential calculus they said well can you teach it to us he said no he said well how are we going to do it he said you got to learn it well how we going to learn it he said Well I'll tell you where the book books are you can go get the books and read it now if you have any problems you can come and ask me about them but I'm not going to teach it to you well they did

that at the end of that summer 95% of the students involved in that exercise passed the first two years of mathematics at case Institute of Technology by examination that's what I mean by teaching is an obstruction to learning When motivated to learn mathematics they learn it and an incredible speed many years ago we did research on alcoholism and came out with a theory which we're able to test and proved valid one of our students a young man by the name of Robert cour got very excited about it he came to see me one day he

said that stuff on alcoholism is really exciting he said I wonder if it would work on drug addiction I said well it might in part but I think they're a Different phenomena so there'd be some required adjustment he said I'd like to look into it can you support me for a couple months while I try to find out something about drug addicts we said how much time you want he said 3 months and we dug up the money and gave it to him he disappeared 3 months later he appeared in my office and said I've

written a proposal for research on drug addiction I'd like you to tell me what you think About it he showed it to me and it was incredible with minor modification I submitted it to National Institute of Health and got 360,000 for research on drug addiction that's not the point of the story the point of the story is that Bob Court the young man who did allas was invited by the medical school of the hospital University of Pennsylvania to come over and give a course on drug addiction to the Doctors he never had a course in

medicine never known anything about drug addiction but he came to campus's Leading expert on a subject how he learned it wasn't taught to him I had a group of foreign students from less developed countries come in to see me one day headed up by a young Peruvian named Francisco sagasti and seconded by a young lady called Virginia Meo she was Brazilian he Was Peruvian they said a number of the faculty here have done work on planning for development of less developed countries why don't we have a course on planning for development for Less developed countries

I said that was a great idea he pointed out that we had students in our student body from 13 less developed countries they make an anxious group of students I said no that wasn't acceptable they could teach such a Course he said well what do you mean if we were to teach the course who would be the students I said the five members of The Faculty that you've identified he said you mean you would actually come as students to the class I said yes he said well will you attend regularly we said uh yes if

you don't Bor us we will behave just like you do will you read the assignments well if they're worth Reading and so on he said that's awfully difficult he said we can't give such a course until we know what you already know I said right he said how are we going to learn what you already know I said that's your job that's what we have to do when we teach we got to find out what you already know so you do the same for us he said well can we do it next semester rather than

this one he said yeah and they did those 13 students put on the best course I have ever taken Francisco sagasi became the chief strategic planner for the World Bank and is now the chief planner for the government of Peru Virginia Meo is the chief planner for the government of Brazil and every one of those 13 people hold a major planning function in a less developed country they were so excited by their experience of learning through teaching we've got the university and The college upside down we think we know what they have to learn that's

unimportant what's important is that they learn how to learn now a few other characteristics of our educational system have to be changed we may make an absolutely incredible assumption that the world is organized the way a university is now what does that mean well we say Experience involves physical problems chemical problems psychological problems social problems economic problems philosophical problems religious problems and so on there are different kinds of problems and so we organize around these different kinds of problems we take reality apart into disciplines and we think a discipline represents reality there is no such

thing as a Physical problem a chemical problem a social problem an economic problem those are absolute Illusions those adjectives don't tell you a damn thing about a problem they tell you something but not about the problem but we treat them as though they tell you something about the problem we don't even tell students what the are of disciplines is one of the most exciting things I ever read is the first sentence of a Book called on human communication by Colin Cherry a British cybernetician and information theorist who spent 1976 on a sabatical year at MIT

and wrote this book and the first sentence of the book reads as follows the German philosopher libnet was probably the last living man who knew everything what an exciting idea so I went back to look into it he was literally true liet spoke 12 Languages he made major contributions to mathematics and science as we knew it that day the entire domain of science was capable of being contained in a single human brain but after livets that became increasingly impossible as the domain of human knowledge enlarged the first division that occurred occurred at the time of

Newton Newton was not a professor of physics physics didn't existed didn't Exist when Newton was there Newton was a professor of natural philosophy because the first division that occurred in the domain of human knowledge was between philosophy and natural philosophy now they didn't have the guts to call the other part unnatural philosophy which it was and then natural philosophy divided into physics and chemistry and as recently as 1900 there Were only six Sciences physics chemistry biology psychology and sociology six Sciences currently on the register of the national research Council are 450 disciplines see disciplines are

in a fact of nature they represent a filing system for knowledge they're exactly a filing system you probably have a file in your office with multiple drawers and one drawer reads a to c and the next Drawer D to F and so on there are ways of retaining information so you can get access to it easily the fact that Armco steel and Alcoholics Anonymous are in the same file don't mean a damn thing it's just a convenient way of getting them if you rearrange your file by date of receipt rather than alphabetically you wouldn't change

the content one bit you just change your way of access to it now all the disciplines are are labels on files There are nothing about the content of the files that's an absolute illusion let me give you an example this ghetto that I referred to earlier so-called ghetto uh in its development process started to meet with the faculty a select group of the faculty University regularly every Monday morning and during one of these Monday morning meetings which occurring in my office a young man from the community Came in with a piece of news that stopped

the meeting absolutely dead we had to terminate because of the sadness of the information there was an 83 year-old woman who lived in the neighborhood who had organized what we called a geriatric set these were elderly people who were retired most of them on welfare or Social Security who had organized things like infant care centers they took care Of children from several weeks old up till the time when they're old enough to go to a daycare center so that their unwed teenage mothers could either return to school or go to work they cleared vacant lots

to make them usable as Recreation and rest cent They planted trees in the neighborhood and flowers and things of this sort there were real to the neighborhood we were able to do something for that woman indirectly that neighborhood I had absolutely no medical Facilities whatsoever and we got the University of Pennsylvania Hospital to open the free clinic in the neighborhood which was the first time they had medical services available to them this enabled this old woman to go there once a month for a checkup which she needed because she had a bad heart she had

gone to that clinic that morning and had gone through the usual check had passed it and they had Released her to go home home were two rooms at the top of an old four-story house that had been converted into a tenement and on the third flight of stairs on her way to her home she had had a heart attack and died that's the news that was brought to us and so we sat around the room silently and the first one to speak was a professor of community medicine who was in the room room Sam Martin

he said damn it I told you we Don't have enough doctors in the clinic you see if we have more doctors in a clinic we'd be able to make house calls for patients that shouldn't be coming to us we should be going to them we've got to arrange to get more doctors it was silence Jerry Adams The Economist spoke up next he said Sam there are plenty of doctors in Philadelphia that's not the problem he said the problem is they're private practitioner and she couldn't Afford to call one if her welfare payments or health benefits

were higher this never would have happened she'd been able to call a doctor to her home to give her the exam silence professor of architecture said why don't we make them put elevators in all those buildings and then the only woman present a professor of Social Work shook her head and said my God what a Pity None of you know anything about that woman don't you know she was married and had a son she was deserted by her husband shortly after the son was born and by working in in house cleaning she raised that son

managed to get him through school at the top of his class he got a scholarship and came to pen and got a degree in Arts and Sciences graduated at top of his class and got a scholarship to the law school he went to the law School graduated at the top of his class and is now after several years of employment one of the Philadelphia law firms a major principal in that firm he is married and has two children he lives in the suburbs on so-called Main Line in a beautiful home with two children and a

wife it happens to be a bungalow and if she weren't alienated from her son she'd be living with him where she'd have all the money she needs and no steps to Climb now here's the question what kind of a problem was that is that a medical problem in economic problem an architectural problem or a social work problem it's none of them it's a problem those adjectives describe the point of view of the person looking at the problem they don't tell you anything about the problem they tell you about the person looking at it but that's

not the way we teach disciplines we give students the wrong Impression that they tell you something about the problem now I've had the remarkable opportunity to work in over 400 different corporations in my lifetime and more than 75 government agencies in over 17 different countries and I've never run across a problem that couldn't better be solved somewhere other than where it was recognized but what happens in reality in a corporation the marketing manager Comes in one morning and finds out the sales dropped in New England uhoh he says we got a marketing problem and he

now takes possession of that problem because it's a marketing problem and tries to solve it by the manipulation of marketing variables but that problem may be much better solved someplace else but that never occurs to him because he was taught there is such a thing as a marketing problem this is what Interdisciplinarity is all about I told a story yesterday which illustrates this perhaps better than anything I can say it's a story of an office building in New York City which at the end of World War II received increasing complaints from its tenants about the

poor elevator service these complaints kept mounting and management didn't know what it could do about it but eventually some of the major clients in the building multiflor Occupants like accounting firms and law firms threatened to break their lease and move out because their uh their employ employees were complaining so much about long delays for elevators so management finally took the problem seriously did a little inquiry and found out there's a group of elevator Engineers or experts in the area and they called him and asked them to come in explained the difficulty and the engineers said

we have to do a Survey to find out how serious the problem is and so they were authorized to do so for a fee of course and they came back several weeks later and said you got a problem the average waiting time for an elevator in this building is about 2 minutes they said the American Standard is 20 seconds which means that you're keeping waiting people waiting six times as long as the desirable average you've got a problem the Management said what can we do about it the engineer said there are only three things you

can do about it one is you could add elevators that means you'd have to take part of the building that's occupied by other things now and put elevators second thing you can do is use automated elevators which move more quickly than the old elevators which you got the third thing you can do is introduce computer controls to your Elevator system this would enable an elevator when it reaches the 20th floor and there's nobody waiting above to go down to the first floor instead of going up to the top before it comes down this saves time

and increases the availability of elevators and management said which one of these is the best he said we don't know you have to do research to find out so they got a great big juicy contract they went off and did the Research came back after several months and a couple million dollars later and said you got a problem what do you mean said well in order to add a sufficient number of elevators to solve the problem you've got to reduce the runable space in this building by an amount that you can't possibly justify by the

change in income it would be a bad investment but what about automating the elevators well that will only reduce the Time to about 1 minute which is still three times too much what about computer controls same thing they said what are we going to do said management engineer said you can't do anything it's an old building and it's a it's the cost of age and they left complaints kept going on and finally management became absolutely desperate and decided to do something would never do Under normal circumstances these were absolutely Unique conditions so they called a

meeting of their subordinates the head of each department in the building was called and everyone came a large building like this employs between two and 400 people except a had of personnel Department he was off on a trip and he sent his young assistant who was a recent graduate in Personnel Psychology from Penn State and when they entered the room Management described the problem to them and the result of the engineering study he said what I want to do here today is brainstorming he said now this is what brainstorming is I'm going to ask you

if you have any ideas of how we can solve the problem and somebody will make a suggestion now nobody can say what's wrong with the suggestion why it won't work if you don't think it'll work you have to say what you would do to it to make it workable so every contribution Has to be constructive working our way toward a solution is that understood and everybody nodded he said okay let's have a suggestion somebody raised his hand and made it and everybody immediately told them why it wouldn't work three or four of these occurred in

a row and pretty soon people stopped making suggestions there was a long silence in the room and the manager got desperate up at the front of the room and finally He looked at the young man he said you haven't said a word he said don't you have any ideas he said sure he said I do have an idea but I'm ashamed to present it he said people will make fun of me he said we we don't have the luxury of making fun of you what's your idea and the young boy told him two weeks later

at a cost of $500 the problem was dissolved now what had he done see everybody had said the problem consists Of slow or not enough elevators we've got to add elevators or increase their speed feet but that's not the way the young man looked at it he said people standing there for 2 minutes are bored they've got nothing to do and they're complaining about the boredom therefore how do I entertain them so they won't mind the wait it's a very different problem the solution was simple he put mirrors up in the lobby so they can

Spend their time looking at each other that has become standard practice you will find now in most modern buildings elevator lobbies will have mirrors all around cuz now the men can look at the women without appearing to do so and vice versa that's what interdisciplinarity is all about it means exploring the different points of view around the problem to find which one or combination of points of view will'll give you the Best solution nobody owns a problem every problem is universal okay so a university is not organized the way reality is or vice versa a

great deal of our effort as Educators is to teach people how to solve problems problem solving now the fact is we very s give them a problem what we usually do is give them exercises or ask them questions well what's the difference you say that's the problem We treat problems exercises and questions as though they're all the same thing and they're very very different for example I have a friend who's very well known in mathematical circles as the inventor of mathematical puzzles of deep significance because their solution always requires some major development of mathematics his

name is Merl flood he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan and recently Retired from the University of California he invented a very well-known problem in mathematics called the traveling salesman problem of all things and he used to love to give me puzzles whenever we met so I met him one day he said I got a new one for you he said we got a bowl a glass balll is full of balls all the same size some of the balls are white and some are black you reach into the ball and come

out with a handful of N Balls you put them down and look at them and M out of the N Balls are black and therefore n minus M balls are white he said now you reach into the ball and pull out one ball at random what's the probability it will be black I said that's easy said what do you mean it's easy it's an unsolved problem in statistics I said it may be unsolved in statistics but it's an easy problem he said what do you mean how can it be easy I said you just tell

me now You know that the ball contains only black and white balls and I'll tell you the answer oh no he said I can't do that it'll spoil a problem I said of course it will it's no longer a problem what you've given me is an exercise you are depriving me of information which you need to formulate the problem that's an exercise that's what a case study is it's not a problem it's an exercise but Because the person who writes the case eliminates information which he used in formulating the case in order to condense it

it's an exercise he said well if that's what you mean by an exercise there's nothing wrong with it it'll still teach you how to solve problems I said if I taught you how to box with one hand tied behind you does that teach you how to box with two hands he said you get killed when you go into The ring he said all right let me fix up that problem he said you look in the bowl now and all the balls are white you reach in and P out a handful of balls and M of

them have a black core in the middle and N minus n have a white core in the middle now you pull out one ball which one what's the probability to have a black core I said how do you know that some of them have a black core and some Don't he said boy he said you insist on spoiling the problem don't you he said all right let me give you one more formulation he said you got one of these pinball machines and you have two exits for the balls one on the right and one on

the left and you shoot n balls and M of them come out on the right and N minus M come out on the left now you got one pull of the spring one ball goes up what's the probability of come out on the left I Said give me a screwdriver he said what for I said I want to take the machine apart and see how it works he says you can't do that I said why not he said because it spoils a problem see he was reducing problems to exercises and exercises are not an exercise

and problem solving it's learning how to box with one hand tie behind your back and that's not what reality is then we come along and we do something to an Exercise we we remove the reason for taking it seriously we remove the context so we go ahead and ask a student how much is 2+ three now we ask that with a full conviction that there's only one possible answer and that's absolutely false you don't know the answer to the question 2 + 3 because you don't know the context am I talking about degrees Fahrenheit am

I talking about logarithms am I talking about number systems to base six instead of base 10 all of these affect the answer but we teach students as though each question has an absolute context and an absolute answer turn therefore 2 + 2 has to be four and 2 + 3 has to be 5 and don't make them aware of the fact that 2 + 3 can be 2 and A2 as it is if they're degrees Fahrenheit and the two bodies are the Same volume and so on and on and on the relativity of questions is

something we never ask so we don't make the distinction between problems exercises and questions and then there's another distinction we don't make the second of three there are four different ways of treating a problem one is Absolution that's the way we treat most problems you ignore it and hope it'll go Away or solve itself so parents come home and find kids fighting and said let them alone they'll solve it that's absolving yourself of the problem problem resolution is a way of treating a problem where you dip into the past and say what have we done

in the past it's a suggest something we can do in the present that would be good enough this is a clinical and experiential approach to problems is Basically qualitative and common sensical in decision theoretic terms it looks for a satisficing answer an answer that is good enough it's the way the clinician Works problem solving looks for the best thing to do in the current circumstances it looks for an optimal solution it's quantitative versus qualitative experimental versus experiential and it's research-based and we leave students with the Impression the best thing you can do with the problem

is solve it and that's absolutely false because of a number of reasons one is that no problem ever stays solv but more importantly every solution creates new problems you see every problem in science that was formulated by Galileo has long since been solved but science hasn't disappeared because every time we saw solve a problem we create a new one a new one is harder than the old one the Progress of science depends as much on a generation of new problems as it does on a generation of all solutions we don't teach people that but the

important thing is there's something you can do to a problem is better than solving it and that's dissolving it how in the world do you dissolve a problem by redesigning the system that has it so that the problem no longer is exists there's a marvelous Story Probably apocryphal but I like to believe it's true of a young man who went to the Ohio match company many years ago with a proposal some of you are old enough to remember the paper books of matches which used to be given out every time you bought a package of

cigarettes and there was a problem with those matches because if you left the cover open and struck a match on the abrasive on the Front sometimes a spark would fly from the match and ignite the matches in the book and people would burn their hands and the Ohio match company used to receive at least a, suits a year from people who had burnt their hands well they got enough sense and printed on the bottom of the matchbox a little statement said please close the cover before striking you may remember that it turned out this didn't

do two things first it didn't reduce their Legal liability for burnt hands and secondly it didn't stop most people from striking matches with the book open now this young man came in he said suppose I could tell you how to make a paper book of matches in a way that people cannot possibly burn their hands and it will cost you no more to make that book of matches than it does to make the current one how much is it worth to you he said you tell us what The answer is and we'll tell you how

much it's worth He said oh no you tell me how much it's worth and I'll tell you the answer well they wound up hiring lawyers who negotiated the contract and when the contract was finally negotiated involved actually $42,000 according to the story the contract was signed by both men I turned to the young man and said what are you what's your proposal he said take the abrasive and put it on the Back of the matchbook cover and everyone subsequently was done that way see he didn't solved the problem he dissolved it he redesigned the matchbook

cover so the problem no longer existed disillusion involves design solution involves research we don't recognize design as a way of dealing with problems is superior even to research and we don't teach design because we don't know it and don't Understand it some of us like me was lucky enough to be trained in architecture where I learned it without knowing what I was learning the the architect as a profession is the only one I know of who really understands the system he's unconscious of his understanding that may be why he understands it he doesn't know what

he's doing but he does it right see a family comes in and see an architect and they Say we want to build a home and what we want is a house with three bedrooms a living room dining room and kitchen connected to each other we want a family room where the kids can play we want a two-car garage I want it all on one floor we'd like it to be whatever it is colonial or modern architecture we'd like it to cost under whatever it is $100,000 architect says fine let me think about it make some

sketches you Come back in a week and we'll talk about it now what does the architect do does he make a list of the rooms they want and then produce a design of each room and then say how do I put these together into a house is that what he does of course not what he does is produce the sketch of the house the hole and now he begins to put rooms in it he divides the space of the house up into rooms then he looks at it and he says Well these bedrooms are a

little too small and they're the wrong shape they're a little too long for their width so I ought to make them a little wider but that means changing the house should I change the house only if changing the house to accommodate the room makes the house better a part is never modified unless it makes the whole better that's the systemic principle you don't change the part Because it makes the part better without considering its impact on the whole that's systemic thinking you don't improve the performance of a department of a university or a college unless

you can demonstrate that doing so improves the whole but I've never seen in a university or college which evaluates departments in terms of their contribution to the H they're always evaluated in terms of their own Performance because the university is treating treated anti- systemically as a group of autonomous independent entities called departments and so the potentiality for Learning and institutional Higher Learning has never been completely exhausted now the third thing about problems they don't exist there is no such thing as a problem that's an illusion well it's a concept really not An illusion a problem

is to reality what an atom is to a table what you experience are tables not items you have a theory in a concept that tells you that if you reduce a table to its parts you will ultimately reach an indivisible part which used to be called an atom now it's a Parton or a quark doesn't make any difference but what you experience is the whole not the parts into which you have reduced it By conceptual reduction reality consists of a whole mess of problems interacting in fact reality is a system of problems a problem is

an abstraction extracted from reality by analysis it's isolated from reality now what happens when you take a system apart it loses all of its essential Properties and therefore when you take a situation and buy analysis reduce it to the problems of which it is composed you have lost all the essential properties of reality and the essential properties of the parts the problems when you take an automobile apart you got a motor sitting on the floor here that motor which is responsible for moving the car can't even move itself it loses its essential property when separated

from the system Of which it's a part and therefore the problems that we teach people to solve are Illusions they're not real they never have the interactions involved and so it was in the 1950s we had to recognize the need of developing whole new ways of formulating systems of problems which are now referred to technically is messes how do you formulate a mess and how do you solve it and the answer is by Design because it's only through design that you deal with the whole and move to the parts you see we are engaged as

Educators in what might be called The Humpty Dumpty fallacy you remember the Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a great fall all the king's horses and All the King's Men can put Humpty Dumpty together again once the egg breaks you can't reassemble it that's happened to learning we broken it we got all these Pieces and the question is how to bring them together well they can't be interdisciplinarity is nonsense the moment you have disciplines you can't bring them back together again you got a broken egg you're not going to put the the

yolk and the wi back together again we got to start over from scotch and redesign the institution so that the whole is dealt with before the parts are created to fit the hole we do not design The hole to fit the parts which is what we're doing today the colleges and Assemblies of departments the Departments are not integral parts of the whole we have an incredible challenge facing us and are we going to stand up to it or are we going to try to preserve the capital that we've invested in our own education and transmit

the complacent y that most of us have because we feel that we're reasonably well Educated and the kids will be lucky if they're as well educated as we are which is a terrible crime because we ain't educated at all we're only beginning to realize how little we know about the nature of reality thank you [Music] [Music] e e