How Your Enterprise Can Make Better Decisions and Learn from its Mistakes

"I am not a guru...gurus encourage followers who do things their way. I am an educator...I encourage others to go out and adapt these ideas...to do whatever is going to be the most effective solution for them."Russell AckoffAlthough I am neither a guru nor an educator, I am a person who was the beneficiary of sixty years of enlightening experiences by applying what was learned in academia to support and make decisions in both the private and public sectors. My purpose in writing this book is to encourage you to develop and adapt a decision process that is designed based on those sixty years of making decisions and evaluating their outcome. It is a decision process that can improve your ability to be more influential in the decision making process of your enterprise by bringing forth more visionary and innovative concepts. Additionally it is a suggested approach to learn from your enterprises' mistakes if and when they occur. The idea of a learning and adaptation decision process is based on what I have experienced and learned from very capable and thoughtful people. These past experiences, both successful and unsuccessful, serve as the basis for ideas and approaches in both the private and public sectors to develop more adaptive and imaginative decisions. Reviewing the many experiences that occurred during my career reminded me of how they helped me to appreciate that acquiring a deep understanding of how society thinks, acts, and aspires is essential for providing a progressive enterprise the ability to meet both current needs and develop strategies to develop strategies that will lead to a more successful future. This means that while an enterprise is determining what questions to ask in attempting to address society's satisfaction with what is currently available there is great value is determining what questions to ask in determining what society would also prefer, particularly if society knew it could be made available, and determine the extent to which the enterprise is capable of meeting those future preferences. In essence, by understanding how society uses what is currently available and determining their current level of satisfaction, a public or private enterprise can began to understand how to develop products and services to meet both the current and those undeclared future needs.There is no easy way to meet these tasks. The future we all face is complicated and is changing so fast that determining a future desire based on how we determine current preferences can be very misleading. In this book, I offer a six step process to develop a learning and adaptation decision process; I also demonstrate the value of the each of these steps by providing examples from my past experiences of being required to develop and implement new concepts to meet the changing societal needs that have evolved over time and the manner in which I benefitted from meaningful contact with the academic community. Many of these examples are not presented to show how to do it today. They are shown to demonstrate how what was done, and how it has been modified, while evolving from the environments that existed at that different times. The direction of the book is to demonstrate what knowledge was attained from those experiences that has led to the design of a process that addresses today's problems in today's more complicated fast changing times. In the book I suggest methods of modifying those past approaches and creating new concepts for effective use in the constantly changing and more complicated world in which we now live.These suggested methods are not presented as specific "how to" steps that are to be precisely followed. Instead they are presented in a manner that highlights the thinking and actions that are needed to address current and future conditions so the reader can reinvent and adapt the concepts and methods to the situations and conditions confronting their enterprise.