Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management

Some held that free will was an illusion granted to us by a merciful God who realized how dull…

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Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Perhaps even more revealing of the environment-free orientation of Machine-Age science is the nature of the place in which its inquiry was usually conducted, the laboratory. A laboratory is a place so constructed as to facilitate exclusion of the environment. It is a place in which the effect of one…

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The concept of the universe that derives from the exclusive use of analysis and the doctrines of reductionism and determinism is mechanistic. The world was…

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If there are such indivisible parts and we come to understand them and their behavior, then complete understanding of the world is possible, at least in principle. Therefore, the belief in elements is a fundamental underpinning of the Machine-Age view of the world. The doctrine that asserts this belief is called reductionism:…

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In every domain of inquiry men sought to gain understanding by looking for elements. In a sense, Machine-Age science was a crusade…

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Children given something they do not understand-a radio, a clock, or a toy-are almost certain to try to take it apart to see how it works. From an understanding of how the parts work they try to extract an understanding of the whole. This three-stage process-(1) taking apart the thing to be understood, (2) trying to understand the behavior of the p

Another important consequence of the commitment to causal thinking derives from the acceptance of a cause as sufficient for its effect. Because of this a cause was taken to explain its effect completely. Nothing else was required to explain it, not even the environment. Therefore, Machine-Age thinking was, to a large extent, environment-free; it…

So

Now, if everything in the universe is caused, then each cause is itself the effect of a previous cause. If we start tracing back through the chain of causes do we come to a beginning of the process? The answer to this question was also dictated by the belief in the complete understandability of the universe. It was yes. Therefore, a first cause was