Ackoff's Fables: irreverent reflections on business and bureaucracy
Russell L. Ackoff
John Willey & Sons, 1991
ISBN 0-471-53194-4

Russel Ackoff was an American that also worked in India and taught in Mexico. He retells stories from those three cultures, including the US Navy, and then reflects on them.

This was another book that I read together with my wife, and that we both found delicious. The book was recommended by the Catholic University, but the Portuguese edition is now out of print.

I recall the story of a younger Ackoff requesting a pair of woman garters to the US Navy, to be used inside a submarine to organize a stacks of index cards. The interaction of that request with the US Navy 1940s bureaucracy was both entertaining and enlightening.

A masterclass in problem solving

The following paragraphs (pages 84–85) were a major influence in my own ways of working:

A wrong solution to the right problem is generally better than the right solution to the wrong problem, because one usually gets feedback that enables one to correct wrong solutions, but not wrong problems. Wrong problems are perpetuated by right solutions to them.

Problem treatments. Students are seldom made aware of the fact that there are four different and unequally effective ways of dealing with problems: absolution, resolution, solution, dissolution.

• Absolution consists of ignoring a problem and hoping it will go away or solve itself.

• Resolution consists of doing something that yields an outcome that is considered to be good enough, that "satisfices" (Clinicians tend to resolve problems. Resolutions rely heavily on past experience, trial and error, qualitative judgment, and common sense.)

• Solution consists of doing something that yields what is currently considered to be the best possible outcome, one that optimizes. (This involves a research approach to problems, one that relies heavily on experimentation and quantitative analysis.)

• Dissolution consists of redesigning the entity that has the problem or its environment so as to idealize: eliminate the problem and enable that entity to do better in the future than the best it can do now.

I often quote the first paragraph to others. One upon a time I heard "we cannot throw away one month of prototyping effort" as a justification for bad conceptual design fed upon users and support staff for the next 15 years.

• I am often guilty of handling some problems through absolution: if you cannot be effective, at least do no harm, and get out of the way of those actively trying to do something.
• Choosing between solution and resolution is Engineering. I often seek a solution, before compromising into a short-term resolution that does not compromise a future solution.
• For difficult problems, I often seek dissolution. It is often easier to solve a larger problem, because the constraints of the original problem become parameters of the larger problem.

Why I bought this book

During the Post-Graduate Course on Management on the Portuguese Catholic University, one of the teachers recommended this book.