Speaker A
ate the wrong dialing of the right number. Nobody was more surprised than we were. Let me show you what we came up with. You take a typical desk telephone. Look at that from the top down. You got something that looks like this.
Russell Ackoff discusses innovative telephone design and idealized redesign in management, emphasizing broad participation in organizational planning.
Key Takeaways
- Innovative thinking can transform existing technologies, as shown by the push-button telephone development.
- Idealized redesign encourages rethinking organizations without limitations, fostering creativity and improvement.
- Inclusive participation from all organizational levels enriches planning and design processes.
- Expertise is not always required to contribute valuable ideas about what a system ought to be.
- Interactive management planning based on these principles drives long-term technological and organizational advancements.
Summary
- Ackoff recounts a 1951 Bell Labs project replacing rotary dials with push-button telephones, leading to the Touchstone telephone.
- The push-button design reduced dialing time by 20%, increasing telephone system capacity.
- The project led to numerous innovations including video telephones, teleconferencing, and call forwarding.
- Ackoff introduces the concept of idealized redesign, where an organization is reimagined from scratch without current constraints.
- Idealized redesign allows all members of an organization, regardless of role, to contribute ideas for improvement.
- He contrasts traditional expert-driven planning with inclusive system redesign that values input from all stakeholders.
- An example from a Mexican brewery shows how both executives and janitors contributed to redesigning their respective domains.
- Executives focused on strategic questions like product lines and financing, while janitors redesigned practical facilities like lavatories.
- Ackoff highlights the power of inclusive participation to generate innovative and relevant organizational designs.
- The approach forms the core of interactive management planning and has influenced major technological and organizational changes.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And you have the dial over here. We took the dial off the telephone. We put something else in its place. Now, something else that you all have around today but didn't exist in 1951.
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We put a hand calculator on the telephone. That is, we put a register and 10 buttons, one for each digit, plus an eleventh button in the corner. And the way you were going to use this telephone was as follows.
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It comes to the phone. You do not lift the receiver off the hook. You leave it there. You put your number into the phone by pushing the box. The number you push in shows in the register. Now remember, you got the right number in
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your head. You now look at the register. Is that the number you intended to call? If it is, you pick up the receiver and the whole number goes through it once. If it isn't, you hit the red button, which
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is a clear button, and start over again. Eliminate the incorrect dialing, wrong or right numbers virtually. While we were so excited, we couldn't contain ourselves. It was a little problem. Now, we didn't know whether it was feasible. Remember, there were no hand calculators.
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The chip didn't exist in those days. So we called up the electronics department and said, we need some technological advice. Can you send some experts over? About a half hour later, two young men looking as though they were fresh out of
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MIT came in and said, what do you want? So we started to explain to them what we were interested in and wanted to know whether this could be done. As we're describing this to them, they began to whisper to each other,
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consulting with each other, paying less and less attention to us. Now, this was rude, but that was standard Bell Labs. But what they eventually did was not. They got up and left the room without any explanation. We were so damn mad we
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couldn't contain ourselves and we decided not to chase them or hell with them, you know. We went on to something else. About three weeks later, these two young men reappeared in the room again, looking very sheepish and saying, look, we're sorry about what
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happened last time. You probably wonder what we did, why we left the way we did, and we'd like to explain. [Music] Well, we expressed some interest in knowing what had happened, so they said, you know, what you were
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telling us was really very exciting, but not for the reasons that you thought. You see, that wrong number stuff isn't very interesting, they say, but those buttons, those are really a nice idea. So we ran out of here, went back and built a
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telephone with push buttons. We have tested it on 2,000 people since we saw you. They said, you know, it takes 12 seconds less to put a number into a telephone by pushing buttons than turning a dial. That's a twenty percent increase in the
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capacity of the telephone system. Over in our department, they said, we have started a project this week to develop a telephone and it's got a code name. They said, we decided to call it the Touchstone telephone. That's where the Touchstone telephone
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came from. But that was only the beginning. In the course of the next year, we designed telephones that covered every single one of those 92 properties and they were feasible. Those phones have all been built. They're not all commercially available,
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but they all exist. Many of them, you know, the video telephone is a product of that. Teleconferencing was a product of that project. The fact that you can now go visit your friends and receive your phone calls there if you want them to, is a product
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of that project. I have used a telephone the size of a hand calculator standing on top of a mountain in the Poconos, talked to Paris, France, had no wires hung from my neck. It came with me. And when I was talking on the phone,
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somebody else was trying to get me. It told me that and told me who it was and allowed me to deliver a message to them without stopping my original conversation. All that's been done. Every major technological change has
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occurred in the Bell System since 1953 came out of that project, and most that will occur between now and 2000 will still come out of that project. It's going to take them that long to use all it produced.
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Incredible experience. That concept has become the core of interactive management planning. Now let me explain. It starts by taking the organization to be managed or planned for. It can be seen it was destroyed last night. It no longer
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exists. The exercise is to redesign it from scratch, developing a conception of the organization you would replace it with right now if you were free to replace it with any organization you wanted, subject to the conditions I gave you.
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Now, there are some additional conditions which are discussed in the book and I don't have time to go into them now, but that's the fundamental idea. That is called an idealized redesign of the system, and that's the core of the process.
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You will stand there and say, how do I get back to where I am now? Let me show you what happens when you do this. First, when you engage in idealized design, it enables everybody in an organization to participate.
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Everybody. Why? In normal planning, when you say, what can be done to improve CNN, you can't contribute to that unless you know a great deal about CNN. You got to be an expert, and experts are a subclass of the
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culture population. Everybody can't participate. What the hell can the janitor contribute? But when you ask about a system, what ought the system to be, then anybody who's affected by the system has some relevant opinions. There's no such thing as an expert on an
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audit question. So that I don't know anything about banking, but you ask me what a bank ought to be, boy, I got all kinds of ideas because I got to use those damn things and they're stupid. I would like to have a bank in which I
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could walk to cash a check where they don't treat me like John Dillinger, for example. I would like to have a single account, not multiple accounts, the insurance arrangement, deposit, absolutely no, and on and on and on. I can list all those
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things, and yet I don't know anything about how a bank works. This has an incredible impact. Everybody in an organization can participate. Let me take an extreme case. A brewery in Mexico a number of years
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ago, seven, eight years ago, started this process and decided immediately to give everybody in the corporation the chance to participate. Eighteen thousand employees using tape like this. They were all exposed to instruction on how to do it, set up in teams, and they went to work.
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Let me take two extreme teams. At the top of the corporation was an eight-man executive group, and they started the plan to design the corporation over again from scratch. The very other extreme that happened there were eight janitors in the brewhouse
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who also started the process. So were they doing the same thing? Of course not. You wouldn't be surprised by what the executives did. They did what comes naturally. They ask questions: What product line should we have ideally? Should we go beyond beer?
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Have soft drinks, food, and so what markets should we work in? How will we finance the company? How should it be organized? Where should it be located? All the questions you would expect the executives. Now, the janitors didn't ask any of
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those questions. They didn't even know what a debt to equity ratio was or a debenture or anything like that. They did what they knew about. Now, what did they know about? They knew about cans, laboratories. Therefore, the question that they
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addressed was, if the laboratories were all wiped out last night and we had to do them over again from scratch, what will we put in their place? And they came out with the most beautiful design of lavatories I have
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ever seen. Now, I have told this story to perhaps 500 groups of executives over the years, senior executives, and whenever I tell it, a benign smile comes across their face. This is very cute, and they say, yes, they said, well, what's that got to do
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with corporate planning? And they sa-
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suppose i take the top eight executives of your corporation or your government agency send them away for three months incommunicado and lock their offices what will happen to your organization i always get the same answer you know what it is
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nothing it'll be there it'll work we can adapt okay i say now let's take the janitor send them away for three months incommunicado and lock the kids you won't be there tomorrow the simple fact is that the corporation
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or the agency depends a lot more on its janitors than it does on this chief executive officers [Music] now that's not the point though the point is this that no group of executives ever produced an organizational plan they can
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what they produce a plan of is the executive function you see those cans are just as much a part of that organization as the debt that that equity ratio is and in a normal plan that's never covered now let me show you what happened
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when they finished their plan the brew house workers also produced a redesign of the brew house which they were interested in when we brought the two together to read each other's designs i have never heard so much laughter in my life it's the
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only time in my life i literally saw people rolling in the aisles these little mexicans were literally rolling in the aisles why the house workers had designed a marvelous brew house for producing beer but they forgot to provide any
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facilities for getting rid of it the janitors on the other hand had used so much space for these marvelous lavatories there wasn't enough room to brew the beer in so i looked at each other and laughed and said obviously what we got to do is
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get together they did they now produced a joint design that took care of both functions meantime the packaging line workers over here produced their design redesign of the packaging line the quality control people produced their redesign of the packaging line
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because they were taking product out of it to test when they were brought together they had an incompatible pair of designs so they worked on it together and produced the joint design and the four groups were put together and they didn't
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match turned out they had forgotten to get the beer from the brew house to the packaging line they had to redesign so they could get the beer from one place doing that they did it now throughout the organization at every
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level these horizontal interactions were taking place and meantime these plans these designs were floating up the organization and down influencing each other and the planning group had the responsibility for saying that no group did anything which affected any other group without them
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getting together and settling what do you think happened to the janitors in this process i don't mean they had fun of course they had marvelous fun but something else fundamental happened which is a principle benefit of planning everybody engaged in this process began
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to realize how what they do affects the performance of the whole and when everybody in an organization begins to use the criterion the performance of the whole rather than the performance of the unit of which he's a part the improvement and
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performance which you create is incredible and that's the principal benefit of this plan it's the immediate improvement in performance that comes about by trying to improve the performance of the system as a whole and not your part of it
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now all kinds of other things happen mention a few this process generates consensus in an organization why because the further out you get towards ideals from immediate actions from immediate actions to the short run of the ideals to set objectives the
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medium-run objectives the long-range objectives without the ideals the further out you get towards that the more agreement there is among us most human disagreements occur down at this end of the scale i know most people don't believe that
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the reason i don't is because of an unfortunate accident the english language the worst conflicts of which we're aware are ideological but ideologies have nothing to do with ideals they have only to do with means i know you don't believe that but you
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can convince yourself very easily i wish there were time to take you through a test have you ever looked at the constitution of the soviet union it's almost exactly like the constitution of the united states you would be shocked to see how similar
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they are the difference between the united states and soviet union is not about ultimate objectives it's about how you get there means now in this process it becomes apparent to us that most of our disagreement is about means not ends
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and therefore we develop an ability to negotiate lesser differences because we appreciate the importance of our having the same ultimate values and that consensus that generates creates commitment let me just give you an example in 1971-74 we worked for the president of france
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and his cabinet that was pompadou at the time to prepare a long-range plan for paris first there was a committee appointed by the president to work with us as the overseeing staff that consisted of cabinet members plus representatives of each of the 12
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political parties of france running from the extreme right to the extreme left when the plan for paris was ultimately submitted to the cabinet of france in 1974.
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it went with letters of support from each of the 12 political parties that was the first time in the history of fans that ever agreed on anything that is literally true they had never agreed on anything before but they all agreed on what paris ought
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to be you won't be surprised when i tell you what they wanted it to be they all wanted paris to be the capital of the world it didn't make a difference whether a communist or a fascist or in
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between now they didn't mean capital of a world government because they didn't think there was ever going to be a world government they had a very specific idea there are an increasing number of institutions in the world which deal
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with the interactions of nations they want to pass to be the principal location of such institutions and they went on and designed the city of paris around that concept by the way that plan has been in implementation since 1976 i'll show you some of the
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results of it as we go along this process unleashes an incredible amount of creativity why if i brought you together and said look the navy education and training command was destroyed last night let's start over again you know your natural reaction be my god
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what a stupid damn thing you know it's absolutely inconceivable i said well you got to do it and you say well if i got to do it i sure as hell don't have to take it seriously so you may as well relax and enjoy it
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that means don't take it as work play play have fun and that's the secret to creativity that's why kids are so creative and adults are not kids play and you work if you want to get you to play you'd be
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a hell of a lot more creative than you are and if you force kids to work they'll be a lot less creative than they are the kind of things that happen when you start this process which is so
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outrageous that you don't take it seriously is you begin to discover that for the first time in your life you're doing fundamental thinking about the system you care about let me give you an example okay working with the big bank in new york
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corporate headquarters there are 2 000 people in the corporate headquarters that had three thefts from the bank by employees in the last six months amounting to 14 million dollars they had apprehended two of the groups of criminals the third one got away god knows where
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brazil or someone when they were redesigning the bank from scratch the focus was on security all they had television monitors everywhere they were magnetically inscribing every document and then have magnetic ringers readers every time you pass one with beep and
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you'd be inspected and so on they were designing security in to the hill in that meeting i had one of my graduate students with me i frequently have to do that in case i need an idea so in the middle of this conversation he
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broke in and he turned to the president of the bank he said can you tell me how these people got the money or the securities out of the bank he said sure he said it's just paper should they put it in the lining of
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their suit or even in their lunch pail or a briefcase he said we don't inspect them when they leave they could say well why don't you he said you realize how long it takes to inspect a person for paper you would
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have to take every sheet of paper they got and look at it to see whether it's security or money it doesn't take much a security can be worth a hundred thousand dollars some of them a million he said it would take 15 to 20 minutes
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per person 2 000 people we'd be here all night into the next day you can't do it while the student was subdued by that he sat back and looked like he was sulking and the conversation went back to
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television monitors about five minutes later he suddenly broke out unashamedly and yelled i got it he said and everybody looked at him and he said everybody in the bank work in the nude [Music] now think about that for a moment
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you know what's all the problem you couldn't get away with very much [Music] and think of what it would do for marketing now under normal circumstances the first thing that somebody would point out outs that can't be done right
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but that's not what happened why because these guys were playing nobody was taking this serious vice president of operations said now wait a minute he said that's a hell of an idea he said you know we don't need to have
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everybody working the nude if we just get them in the nude right before they leave the bank that's all we need he said how can we do that 30 minutes later they had the answer a month later or so with a little more
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than a month they installed it and they haven't had a theft since you know what they did they went to paris and hired two of the biggest designers in paris to design uniforms for everybody in the bank male and female beautiful uniform
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several for each employee i redesigned the entry of the bank i'll just show you schematically you come into the bank and you go into a locker room and you undress you strip and you go through a shower room
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which in the morning is not open you can take a shower if you want to but you don't have to you can walk right through it there's another locker room here where your uniform is and you dress go to work
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the other day you come back and you reverse take your clothes off here and now you can't go in through the shower room without getting soaking wet because it's running in such a way that there's no way of getting through there with
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anything on you dry come out here get dressed and leave the bank no thanks see they're working in the newt now that kind of solution never would have been found under normal circumstances the creativity that's unleashed is absolutely incredible
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let me tell you one story which reveals why this happens in 1976 when i was in mexico i got a phone call one day from the chief city planner in mexico roque gonzalez who's an old friend of mine
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and he asked if he could come to see me at my office with some of his colleagues and the four o'clock he appeared with a huge roll of joints and two of his young assistants he told me that the mayor of mexico hank
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gonzalez had asked him to prepare a transportation plan he wanted to show them to me and then he had a problem it took about an hour he showed me six transportation plans alternative plans for mexico city he said now here's my
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problem he said you know the mayor and i can't go to him with six plans i got to go with one i want to go with the best and i don't know which one is best can you help me pick out the best one
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so yeah i can help you but not the way you think he said what do you mean now fortunately roque was a very good friend because what happened next would have lost him if he hadn't been i said none of them are any good
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he looked at me with hurt look shocked he said what do you mean none of them are any good i said oh come on rokay you know that every one of these plans is based on a principle that has been used in other
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cities under more six auspicious and supportive circumstances and they've always failed and we know why they failed and why they have to fail in mexico he said why he said you cannot solve a transportation problem by increasing the
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supply of transportation he said why not because supply always creates more demand than it satisfies the more transportation you build the more congestion you will get he said if that's true then you can't solve a transportation problem i said oh
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no that's not so you can solve a transportation problem by reducing demand not by increasing supply he said you can't do that in a democracy i said sure you can he said name one way i said okay move the capital of mexico
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out of mexico city he said you're not serious he said sure i am 45 of the people employed in this city are employed by the federal government 25 percent are indirectly employed the city's already got 17 million people
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in it it's it's absolutely strangling itself for political and economic reasons you want to disperse the government of mexico get it the hell out of the city and you get more improvement in traffic than all six-year plans put together he
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said of course but you can't move the capital of a country so what do you mean you can't we did in the united states twice i said come on russ that was 200 years ago that happened to be 19 1976 by the way
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and i said all right what about brazil he said that was 40 years ago i said all right what about tanzania they're doing it right now oh he said come on russ that's africa he said you don't understand
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mexico city was the capital of the aztec empire i said i know that what difference does it make and he shook his head he said boy if you don't understand the difference there's nothing i can say to make you
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understand you see you're just not a mexican and that was true so we both sat there sucking and after a little while were both embarrassed he said all right you got any other crazy ideas i said yeah i changed the working hours
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he said how's that going to help he said the official working hours of mexico are 10 to 2 and 5 to 8.
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this three-hour period is called the siesta and now we know two things about the cs first is 23 of all the trips taken to the city are taken going back and forth during the siesta and if we eliminate even a fraction of
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those it will be more improvement than all your six plans put together furthermore the siesta is no longer used for sleeping although the bedroom is frequently involved in what it is used for so what you want to do is reduce the
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siesta to a sensible one-hour limit and then you will have more relief of traffic than anything you have proposed he said of course but you can't reduce the siesta i said why not he said that's an integral part of the
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mexican culture i said that's no explanation i said when cortez landed you were killing 150 teenage boys a day at the top of the pyramid you don't do it anymore you changed the culture i said come on he said that's ridiculous
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kind of an argument i said why is it ridiculous he said you want to understand you're not a mexican now i went through eight such proposals with and everyone was rejected because i wasn't a mexican everyone now the reason
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i've told you this story is this two months later lopez bertillo was inaugurated as president of mexico in his inaugural address on december 4th as i recall he made two announcements the first was of the dispersion of the capital of
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mexico out of mexico city he said henceforth will be no new government buildings built in mexico city they'll all be built out and as buildings become irreparable we will not replace them in mexico city we're gonna move them out we're gonna
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move every damn thing out we possibly can as quickly as we can second thing he did was change the working hours of mexico in his first act in office he did two things that the chief planner told me
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were impossible question where was the impossibility right in the head of the planet in the head of management the principal obstruction between where you are and where you would most like to be is what you that's awfully hard to take but that's
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the absolute truth it doesn't make any difference who you are it's me we are the principle obstruction between where we are where we must want to be the great american philosopher the greatest american philosopher pogo knew that remember where pogo's walking off to the
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woods and his friend says him hey where are you going pogo he said i'm going to hunt the enemy a little later he's coming out of the woods a friend said you find him he said yep he said who he says they is us
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we are the principal obstruction of our own progress most planning is based on the fallacious assumptions the major obstructions are then it out there and even if you succeed in changing all that stuff you're not going to get what
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you want because you haven't touched the major obstruction which is us when you design what you would do ideally if you could do whatever you wanted you will go through a shock and the shock is the realization that
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you could have most of it if you really wanted it without anybody else's intervention and it's that realization which has the biggest impact on an organization when you finally realize that the future is largely under your control you can do it if you want to
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and you are the principal obstruction unless you are removed that's what makes this thing so exciting because when you redesign the navy or the university of pennsylvania and the rest of it whatever it happens to be and you look at that thing you say oh my
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god we can really have most of it if we wanted to your concept of feasibility changes look in paris let me tell you about three proposals we made which were accepted first that the capital of france be moved out of paris
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paris is the oldest national capital of the world you know in 1976 the government of france accepted that recommendation and has been moving the capital out systematically since the orleans and more than 50 percent of the capital is
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out of paris now the ceremonial stuff is still there but the working part of the government's been moved out most of it how come we recommended the paris be declared an open city no longer subject to the government of france
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paris has the largest percentage of its nation's population of any city in the world 42 percent of frenchmen live in metropolitan parish mexico comes next with 25 new york only has eight and yet they accepted it why well the answer is obvious i told you if
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you want powers to be the capital of the world it can't be the capital of france there's a conflict if it's going to be capital world it must be an open city that anybody can come or leave from without
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being subject and national control therefore what is normally seen is infeasible if i suggested just out of the blue moving the capital of france not only became feasible it was seen as absolutely necessary what an incredible conversion what's the difference between seeing it
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as feasible and is necessary the difference is all up here nothing happened in the outside world and so they're doing it the whole point of planning should be changing ourselves nobody can develop you you can only develop yourself
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planning must be a method of self-development idealize redesign is the most effective method of doing that that i know of okay let's take a break at this point and we'll talk about it when we come back [Music] while we're up to the last bit
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now before we go ahead let's take a little time to discuss any aspects of this central concept that i've just taken you through the idea of basing management and planning on a vision of what you would be if you could be whatever you
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wanted i'm working backwards from there to see what's the closest approximation to that you can in fact realize are there any questions or comments or observations you would like to make about that no well the last section i've been asked to
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talk a little bit about education that's very very difficult because like you that's a business we're both in and it's very hard to be brief about something that you spend a lot of time in and think a great
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deal about so i want to try to say a few things that might provoke some discussion without trying to give you a lecture about something that you know a great deal about first let me point out that you have two words education and
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training they're quite different training is the conveyance of knowledge it's instruction teaching people how to do something that's quite different from education or at least what education ought to be most of education is a conveyance of information it's description
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it ought to be the conveyance of understanding explanation but it very infrequently is education as a whole is an archaic system deeply rooted even today in the machine age the model on which schools are based is the factory of the industrial
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revolution you just think about it you got a filtering process in which you take a very wide array of people and narrow it down is to an acceptable raw material which comes into a process which is then uniformly treated and
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operated on to produce a uniform output which is then given a model number and a trade name brand name so it's wharton 85 or harvard 36 all models is completely mechanistic this process is designed without regard to the individual characteristics of the
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material going through it the material has to adjust to the process not vice versa it's divided up into atoms courses curriculum programs and so on they're sequenced in a row even the students are usually organized alphabetically or according to size and
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treated like a group of items on the production line if you look at a school dispassionately it becomes clear that it's modeled after a typical automobile production and assembly line it's completely inhumane that would be bad enough but it's stupid
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which is much worse absolutely stupid and that's the incredible thing about our culture that we will tolerate let's just take a couple of evidences of this the educational system is based on the fundamental assumption that the best way
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to learn something is to have it taught to you and we know that that is absolutely false not only is it false we know it is probably the least efficient way there is to learn something for example how did you learn to speak english
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nobody taught it to you but i bet you there's hardly anybody in this room who can speak a second language decently although you may have taken four to five years of it in school obviously if you want to learn a language you
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don't want to have it taught to you it's a terrible way to learn it how many of you have ever taught a course in a subject that you had never had as a student how many of you have
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ever done that only a few of you the rest of you will know the answer to the next question even if you haven't who learned the most in your class teacher one of the most effective ways of learning a subject is not to have it
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taught to you but to teach it to somebody else we know that every teacher knows that we got the damn schools reversed the students ought to be teaching what we want them to learn who should they be teaching
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the teachers the teacher should be the students being taught i'll just think about this for a moment i'll tell you about an experiment which proves what i'm saying there's never been anything more inhumane done the computer assisted instruction it is absolutely ridiculous
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a number of years ago i was attending a meeting at rca and there was extolling the virtues of their new program for computer assisted instruction and mathematics has been developed by soupies out at the university of california now soupy's is a brilliant philosopher
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and logician i know him slightly they showed me a film an hour film on the marvels of this process and they were done they said what did you think of it i said well it's very impressive but i
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got a couple of questions he said like what i said in the course of mathematics from which these photographs were taken in what sessions were the films made they said what do you mean they said was it the first session the
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second the third the fourth or what they said what difference is it i said well i'd like to know do you mind they said well we don't know we'd have to call selfies they said well there's telephone why don't you call suppie so
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they did so they got stuff he's on the phone they said what session were those films made he said the fourth and then they turned to me they said the fourth they said now ask them what happened later in the course
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then there's a long silence while they're listening they said the course was never completed why the kids complained so damn much their parents withdrawn from the program can you imagine anything more insulting to a human being than putting him in
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front of a machine telling him the machine knows more than you do and it's going to teach you how to do something you know what an absolute outrage to human dignity to be told that if you're real good
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you'll be as good as a machine what a stupid thing to do now i want it to be done i'll tell you how it ought to be done it's been shown demonstrated we did a project with phil philco ford a
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number of years ago which had tried for years to develop an effective program in remedial reading and an effective program of remedial arithmetic elementary stuff typical program and none of them worked they had developed them with temple university for the philadelphia school
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system he said you got it reversed he said what do you mean i told him a story in 1953 i was living in cleveland working at case and i had a good friend who was the headmaster of the hawkin day school
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which is one of the more exclusive day schools in the cleveland area case had just gotten univac ii we were one of the first universities to get a large computer in 53. we got the bureau census univac ii
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by today's standard it was absolutely incredibly complicated you had to program it machine language and you know you had the air conditioned rooms because of the thousands of vacuum tube you know archaic but there it was we were talking about it one day and i
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was complaining to him about the underestimation of the capacity of his kids he said what do you mean we underestimated we push him to the hill i said hell you don't even know what the hilt is he said for example
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i said why do you wait until they know all of arithmetic and mathematic and algebra before you expose them to the computer don't you start him right off with it he said how can you i said well it's
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easy we could take your second grade kids and teach them how to use a univac he said how will you do it i said we would teach them to use the univac to do their homework they said well what's that
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use the univac as a student and the student as a teacher and their job is to teach the computer to do what you want the student to learn it took four weeks to teach those kids how to use the univac to do their
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homework now you can teach a computer something that you can't do yourself therefore if you want to teach it how to do it you've got to know how to do it nobody taught them they learned and they did it themselves
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reverse the roles make this the computer the teach the student make the student the teacher you have a perfect way of evaluating what the student knows just see what the computer can do because he's taught it whatever he knows
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another one remedial english they couldn't get it right we took three tables and arranged them in the triangle like this put a computer terminal on each one with a keyboard we have a student sitting here they can see each other but they can't see the
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face of each other's terminal the terminal would come on and give them an incorrect english sentence of some kind okay the boys has a book or the boy has books the instruction was to correct the incorrect word each one of the three students
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independently had to correct the incorrect word when they're finished the computer comes back and says two of you were right and one of you is wrong that's all it says well how do they find out who was wrong
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they got to talk about it they talk about it they can use any references they want to but they got to find out who's wrong and get it corrected and they do put it back in the computer and we'll
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come back and say well there's still one of you wrong or you're all right and then come out with the next question the computer is used as an instrument to facilitate their learning from each other not from the computer
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it becomes truly their instrument for learning not their teacher and it worked like a chart in our program at the university of pennsylvania which was originally started in the 70s as an experimental program we have no courses we eliminated
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all courses our learning is done through what we call cells groups of students and faculty who negotiate to come together to jointly learn the subject they want to learn now for example group of students came to me about it two years ago and said we would
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like to have a cell on planning for development of less developed nations third world countries i said it's fine that's a good subject they said there are a lot of faculty have done work in that we said right
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five of us have done work in that area they said would it be possible to arrange for a cell with all of the men he said course yeah i'll check with him and i did and they were all willing
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and they said well what do we do now he said that's up to you it's your learning experience now the first thing they had to do was they recognized that we were in that class as students not as teachers
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and therefore if we didn't learn anything we would walk out and i have walked out of such classes because i wasn't learning anything therefore what do they have to do before that course begins they're going to have to find out
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everything i've said about the subject so that they don't waste my time and they learn all i know about the subject before the course begins not after it because i don't waste my time telling them what's written and out
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there in the literature that's what they have to pick up and their job now is to educate me in there that's their job but who are they really educating themselves in the process at the end of the course we never give
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an examination what a stupid way to evaluate people examinations is there any situation in the real world where you were evaluated by examination except in the civil service how do you evaluate people by how well they can do a job
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right if i give you a job to do do i tell you you can't talk to anybody else you can't read a book you can't use notes hell no i want you to get the job done i don't give a damn how you do it
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but get it right but you're teaching that they have to do it in complete isolation which is never the way they're going to work in the real world it's stupid to examine them that way and to evaluate them by how well
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they can imitate a combination of a tape recorder a video tape machine and a permanent file you know how could they regurgitate what you've told them what an incredible way of evaluating you know how we evaluate students every student in a cell has to evaluate
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every other student but he doesn't evaluate him in terms of how much the other student has learned he evaluates each student in terms of how much that student has taught him each student evaluates every other student as a teacher
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not as a student and boy that really separates the ones that are good from those who are bad you can't teach something you don't know and therefore if you've taught somebody something and he says so then you know
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that well that's only the beginning there isn't a single aspect of the educational system that can't be stood on its head and you come out better for having done it no matter what it is whether it's examination whether it's courses or
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curriculum just look at the way we organize curriculum we divide it up into courses right you come out of school with a certain set of conceptions in your head reality consists of physical problems chemical problems biological problems psychological
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problems social problems political problems philosophical and so on and on right there aren't any such things that's an absolute myth there is no such thing as a political problem a financial problem a social problem a marketing problem a military
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problem there is absolutely no such thing those adjectives in front of the word problem don't tell you a damn thing about a problem but we convince everybody that it does it tells you something but it doesn't tell you anything about a problem
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what does it tell you about well let me tell you a story in the 1970s late 60s and 70s we were working intimately with the so-called urban black ghetto just north of our universities an area of 22 000 people in eighty city blocks
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called mantua that in 67 initiated a self-development project in ten years they completely transformed themselves from the worst slum in philadelphia into a more desirable residential area i got 17 national awards for the subject of seven national tv
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programs they did absolutely incredible things on their own with help that they got only when they asked for there was a meeting of the leaders of that community in my office one day together with a group of the professors
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who were trying to help them in the middle of the meeting somebody came in with a piece of information to stop the meeting dead there was a marvelous 83 year old woman in the neighborhood who had undertaken the task of organizing what's called a
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geriatric set the old people in the community into an active development force and she had done an incredible job they had opened six infant care centers they had cleaned up lots these old people and converted them into recreational
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uh spots they planted flowers and trees and they've all sorts of things and fortunately we're able to do something for her that neighborhood had absolutely no medical facilities within it with the help of the university of pennsylvania hospital we opened up a
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clinic in a neighborhood that was free to all members of the neighborhood so that once a month she could go to the clinic and get her health check up she had a bad heart that morning she had gone to the clinic
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for her monthly checkup they had checked her and found she was okay and she had left it to go home home consisted of a single room on the fourth floor of an old converted large house that's characteristic of a
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slump on the third flight of stairs up to her room she'd had a heart attack and died now that's the news that was brought to us okay the long silence in the room finally the professor of community medicine who was present from the
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medical school said god dammit i've been telling you guys we need more doctors if we had more doctors in that clinic we'd be able to make house calls and this never would have happened there's a silence in a room and the next
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one to speak was a professor of economics who was there he said you know there are plenty of doctors trouble is they're private practitioners and they cost money and she didn't have any money we had better welfare payment or
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coverage of medical expenses she could have called a private practitioner and he would have come to her house and it wouldn't have happened another little bit of silence and the third person a professor of architecture spoke up he said why don't
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you make them put elevators in all those buildings the fourth person to speak up was the only woman in the room a professor of social work and she shook her head she said my god you people don't know
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anything about that woman don't you know that she has a son who's a graduate of the university of pennsylvania law school who is a partner in a major law firm downtown does extremely well he's married and has two kids and they live in a beautiful
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bungalow out in bala kinwood on the main line if she weren't alienated from her son she'd be living with him where she'd have all the money she needed no steps to climb now i've got a question for you tell me
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what kind of a problem that was was it a medical problem an economic problem an architectural problem or a social work problem old age no it's not an old age problem it was just a problem the adjective in front of you that tells
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you nothing about the problem what it does to tell you it tells you about the point of view of the person looking at so somebody says that's an economic problem what he's telling you is he's an economist he's not telling you anything about the
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problem he's looking at the problem as an economic problem that means he's an economist and similarly with physics chemistry marketing and so on the fact is we don't know what's the best way to look at any problem but our education
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leads people to believe that the first thing you do when you're presented with a problem is find out the file drawer to go to do you go to physics chemistry biology or so on we equip them to do that and that's the
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worst conceivable thing you can do to a problem what you have to do is look at it from a wide variety of perspectives to find the best way there's an old story a joke that's told in academic institutions which
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illustrates this beautifully a freshman class in physics professor turns to the class and says suppose i give you a barometer and give you the job of determining the height of the empire state building how would you do it
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one of the engineers in the class raises a hand he said okay how would you do it he said i would take the barometer and go to the base of the building and measure the atmospheric pressure i then go up to the top of the building
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and measure the atmospheric pressure by using a familiar law of physics i would convert it in the height of the building professor said great that's fine that's exactly the way i would do it and he started to talk about something else
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the second student raised his hand a student in physics he said what's the matter he said i would do it a different way he said you would he said how would you do it he said i go up to the top of the
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building with my stopwatch and take the barometer and drop it and see how long it takes to reach the ground and then i would convert it by s is equal to one half gt squared and the height of the building he said very good
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he said i hadn't thought about that he said that's right you can do it that way you start to talk about something else the third student raises hand and the professor said oh my god now don't tell me you've got a solution you're in
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business the kids say well i do he said all right how would a business student do it he said i would take the barometer to the janitor of the building and say he could have it if he told me how high the
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building was they're an incident way a number of ways of approaching any problem but we teach people that there is one way and it's defined by the discipline look at discipline is nothing but a filing a system of organizing knowledge in the
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file system if you come to my file in the office the first two things there are alcohol and alcoholics anonymous does that say they have anything in common hell no it's just a way of filing information doesn't tell you anything
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about the content to say they're in the same file drawer now i can take that same file and reorganize it by dates i haven't changed the content at all but it might be a lot more useful disciplines are constructs of man
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and they're becoming less and less useful do you realize that in 1900 there were only six recognized disciplines in the united states you know how many there are now over 250 we have to keep multiplying them there must be something wrong
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because we keep talking about them about as though the universe is organized the way education is and nothing could be further from the truth the universe has no correspondence the way we've organized education but we convince people that it is
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now we perpetrate one misconception after another in the educational process let me just mention a couple of others i'll tell you a story first i have a very good friend who's one of the leading statisticians in the united
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states he loves puzzles we're having lunch together one day so i got a new one for you russ i said okay what is it said you got a ball full of balls you reach into the ball and you pull out end balls
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out of the end balls ember black and n minus m are white he said now you're going to reach in the ball and pull out one ball what's the probability it will be black he said now that's really a tough one be
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careful i said that's easy as hell he said what do you mean it's easy i said you tell me how you know that the bowl has only black and white balls in it and i'll tell you what the
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probability is oh no no he said you're changing the problem so what do you mean i'm changing the problem you told me that the bolt contains only black and white balls you must know that from somewhere i want to
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know how you know that he said no no you're spoiling it i said i don't understand why are you depriving me of information that you have he said all right i'll change it for you he said we got a glass bowl you can see
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inside of it and you can see that every ball is white you take out the balls and split them and inside is either a black core or a white core you got m black cores and n minus m
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white chords now tell me what the probability is this next ball will have a black core i said how do you know that all the cores are either black or white he said god damn he said he said forget about it
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got a slot machine there are two exits one on the left and one on the right you shoot n n times and m times it falls in the left hand pocket and n minus m it falls in the
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right hand pocket what's the probability the next time you pull a ball it will fall in the left-hand pocket of the right-hand pocket i said give me a screwdriver he said why i said i'm going to take the
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machine apart and find out how it worked he said no you can't do that i said why not he said because i said you can't now what he was asking me to do was to find a solution to a problem in
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which he was depriving me of the information which he had used in formulating the problem that's not a problem that's an exercise in the real world our success depends on our ability to use the information required to formulate problems in their solution but
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we never teach kids how to do that we teach people how to solve problems that are given to them but not how to take problems and in the real world problems aren't given to you you have to take them
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furthermore as i'll tell you right after we break for the film there are no such things as problems they are absolutely abstract concepts that have no correspondence to reality and yet we spend all of our time teaching kids how to deal with them
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what does reality consist of not problems but something else we'll talk about that something else when we come back
Topics:Russell Ackoffidealized redesigninteractive managementtelephone innovationpush-button telephoneorganizational planningBell Labssystem redesigninclusive participationmanagement training
