The Art of Problem Solving

232 Pages·1978·3.1 MB·English

by  Russell L. Ackoff

THE ART OF
PROBLEM SOLVING
ACCOMPANIED BY ACKOFF'S FABLES
RUSSELL L. ACKOFF
Illustrations by KAREN B. ACKOFF
JOHN WILEY & SONS
New York • Chichester • Brisbane • Toronto • Singapore
Copyright © 1978 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada.
Reproduction or translation of any part of this work beyond that permitted by
Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the
permission of the copyright owner is unlawful. Requests for permission or
further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-The art of problem solving.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Problemsolving. I. Title.
HD30.29.A25 658.4'03 78-5627
ISBN 0-471-04289-7
ISBN 0-471-85808-0 (paper)
Printed in the United States of America
28 27 26 25 24 23 22
To
Daniel H.Silberberg
with
gratitude
and
affection
Between truth and lie are images and ideas
we imagine and think are real,
that paralyze our imagination and our thinking
in our efforts to conserve them.
We must continually learn to unlearn
much that we have learned, and learn to learn
that we have not been taught.
Only thus do we and our subject grow.
R. D. Laing, The Politics
of the Family and Other Essays
Vintage Books, New York, 1972
Preface
Over the years, I have been presented to audiences as an architect, philosopher,
statistician, city planner, or operations researcher, or as a behavioral,
communication, information, management, organizational,and systems scientist.
But none of these tells me what I really am as well as did a characterization
given to me by a student. He said I was a problem solver.
Problem solving is what I have been trying to do all my adult life, using
whatever type of knowledge appeared accessible and relevant to me. In my
"early period" I came to problem solving primarily from a philosophical point of
"early period" I came to problem solving primarily from a philosophical point of
view. In my "middle period" I came at it scientifically, keeping philosophy at my
side. And now, in my "late period" I find myself preoccupied with the art of
problem solving, keeping both philosophy and science ever at my side.
The more philosophy and science I tried to bring to bear on problem solving, the
more I came to realize that even together they can assure us no more than
adequate solutions to problems. They cannot provide exciting solutions, ones
that we call "beautiful." Only the kind of problem solving that involves art can
do this. And art implies creativity.
This is a book about creative problem solving. It is addressed to those who either
make their living at, or derive their fun from solving problems-or both.
For me, the term "problem" does not refer to the kind of prefabricated exercises
or puzzles with which educators continually confront students. It means real
problems, the effective handling of which can make a significant difference to
those who have them, even if they are philosophers and scientists.
This is neither a textbook, nor a handbook, nor a learned treatise. It it what is left
from sifting through thirty years of experience, my own and others, in search of
clues on how to make problem solving more creative and more fun. Solving
even the most, serious problems can be fun to the extent that we act creatively,
and having fun in a creative way is also very likely to increase the quality of the
solution it yields.
It will be apparent to even the casual reader that I had a lot of fun writing this
book, much of it derived from the fact that my daughter Karen did its
illustrations. Having her do them turned out to be the only way I have found to
get her to read anything I have written.
I was assisted greatly in preparing the final version of this book by suggestions
made by Paul A. Strassmann. Whenever I doubted whether writing this sort of
thing was my "ball of wax," my good friend Stafford Beer encouraged me to
keep at it. I hope he will not be sorry.
RUSSELL L. ACKOFF
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
January 1978
THE ART OF PROBLEM
SOLVING
PART one—the art
CHAPTER ONE
Creativity and Constraints
Most managers and management educators have a list of what they consider the
essential properties of good management. I am no exception. My list, however,
is unique because all the characteristics, properly enough, begin with C:
Competence
Communicativeness
Concern
Courage
Creativity
The greatest of these is creativity.
Without creativity a manager may do a good job, but he cannot do an
outstanding one. At best he can preside over the progressive evolution of the
organization he manages; he cannot lead it to a quantum jump-a radical leap
forward. Such leaps are required if an organization is to "pull away from the
pack" and "stay out in front." Those who lack creativity must either settle for
doing well enough or wait for the breaks and hope they will be astute enough to
recognize and take advantage of them. The creative manager makes his own
breaks.
Educators generally attempt only to develop competence, communicativeness,
and (sometimes) concern for others in their students. Most of them never try to
develop courage or creativity. Their rationalization is that these are innate
characteristics and hence can be neither taught nor learned.
That creativity can be acquired seems to follow from the fact that it tends to get
lost in the process of growing up. Adults recognize that young children,
particularly preschoolers, are full of it. I recall a dramatic illustration of this
point given by an eminent student of creativity, Edward de Bono, in a lecture to
an audience consisting of managers and management scientists. He drew a
picture on the blackboard of a wheelbarrow with an elliptical wheel (Figure 1.1)
and asked the audience why it had been designed that way. There was a good
deal of squirming, murmuring, and embarrassed tittering, but no answer. De
Bono waited, letting the discomfort grow. He then told his audience that he had
recently asked the same question of a group of children and almost immediately
one of them had rushed to the board and drawn a squiggly line such as that
shown in Figure 1.2. "The wheelbarrow is for a bumpy road," the child had said.
The audience blushed and laughed self-consciously.
Most of us take for granted both the creativity of children and its subsequent
loss. We do not try to understand, let alone prevent, this loss. Yet the
disappearance of creativity is not a mystery; the explanation lies in a query that
Jules Henry (1963), an American anthropologist, once made: What would
happen, he asked,
... if all through school the young were provoked to question the Ten
Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of
Commandments, the sanctity of revealed religion, the foundations of
patriotism, the profit motive, the two party system, monogomy, the laws of
incest, and so on .... (p. 288)
The answer to Henry's question is clear: society, its institutions, and the
organizations operating within it would be radically transformed by the
inquisitive generation thus produced. Herein lies the rub: most of the affluent do
not want to transform society or its parts. They would rather sacrifice what
future social progress creative minds might bring about than run the risk of
losing the products of previous progress that less creative minds are managing to
preserve. The principal beneficiaries of contemporary society do not want to risk
the loss of the benefits they now enjoy. Therefore, they, and the educational
institutions they control, suppress creativity before children acquire the
competence that, together with creativity, would enable them to bring about
radical social transformations. Most adults fear that the current form and
functioning of our society, its institutions, and the organizations within it could
not survive the simultaneous onslaught of youthful creativity and competence.
Student behavior in the 1960s convinced them of this.
The creativity of children is suppressed at home and at school where, Jules
Henry (1963) remarked, "What we see is the pathetic surrender of babies" (p.
291). The eminent British psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Laing (1967) reinforced this
observation: "What schools must do is induce children to want to think the way
schools want them to think" (p. 71). Schools want them to think the way parents
want them to think: conservatively, not creatively.
It is easy to see how schools suppress creativity in children. For example, when
one of my daughters was in her early teens she came into my study one night
with an extra-credit problem that her mathematics teacher had assigned for
homework. On a sheet of paper distributed by the teacher were nine dots that
formed a square.