38. Dr. Russell Ackoff: Dissolve Savant

At the end of World War II, there was an office high rise building in New York City that was receiving complaints from its professional tenants concerning the building's elevators. The managers of the building paid for an elevator engineering survey and they found the wait time for their elevators was six times the American standard. They had a problem!

The managers asked the engineers for a solution and they were given an expensive proposal to perform a study identifying possible solutions to the problem. After several months, and great expense, the engineering firm had identified three solutions:

1. Add more elevators

2. Speed up the elevators

3. Install computer controls

When they asked which solution was best, they got the following responses:

1. The loss in offices due to additional elevators would be cost prohibitive to their business.

2. Increased speed would only cut the wait time in half.

3. Computers would only cut the wait time in half.

The engineering firm concluded: You can't do anything. It's an old building and that is the cost of age.

The company managing the building called a meeting with the head of each department to let them know "we have a problem" and everyone attended except the head of the Personnel department. Instead, he sent a young man who recently joined the company.

The group was told they were going to participate in "brainstorming" and explained: "We are open to any ideas and nobody can say what's wrong with an idea. Instead of saying what is wrong, you need to say what you would do to make the idea workable."

The first person threw out an idea and everyone immediately stated why it wouldn't work. The second person threw out an idea and, well you know what happened. Eventually, people stopped sharing ideas.

The boss looked at the young man and said, "You haven't said a word."

He replied, "I do have an idea, but I'm ashamed of it and I don't want people to make fun of me."

Eventually, they got the young man to share his idea and when they implemented it, all the complaints went away and it only cost $500. How would YOU respond to this problem? (We will look at the answer at the end of this article.)

Last week, I wrote about Truth Savants and defined them as the 1% of people who live their life at 10 flips (Truth) without being able to logically explain their actions. I also ended last week's chapter with:

"I am going to be covering a Truth Savant who would have been 101 years old. (He lived to be 90 years old!) He predicted everything we are seeing in our world today, from business to politics to education, and because he could only explain himself in stories (fables), not only has he failed to be recognized by the general population, his own followers completely misunderstand the Truth he espoused. Instead, they pursued a path that has only led to the growth of Addiction, Sexism, and Racism." I was speaking of Dr. Russell Ackoff.

Dr. Russell Ackoff was born on February 12, 1919. Even though he got a degree in architecture he entered the army in 1942 after working as an assistant instructor of Philosophy for one year. After he got out of the army, he earned a Doctorate in Philosophy of Science and served as an assistant professor in philosophy and mathematics at Wayne State University from 1947 to 1951.

It was then he found his passion and became a professor of operations research at Case Institute of Technology from 1951 to 1964. After that, he was a professor of systems sciences and professor of management science at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania until the ripe old age of sixty-seven years old.

He wrote thirty-five books, but he's best known for a book he wrote in 1978. He was fifty-nine years old and the book was "The Art of Problem Solving." In classic Truth Savant fashion, the roughly 200-page book consists of 10% teaching and 90% stories, which he called "Ackoff's Fables". Also in pure Truth Savant fashion, ALL of the morals are wrong!

Yes, he has extraordinary stories solving problems for everything, from United States corporations to foreign countries. (Mexico City and Paris are among the cities that asked him for help!) However, he couldn't consciously explain how he came up with the answers to the point others would be able to replicate him. All he could do was tell stories and give analogies.

Furthermore, his "solutions" were so elegant and mind-blowing, he didn't call them "solutions". At various times in his career he used different terms until he struck upon a metric consisting of four levels. He would say, "There are four ways to approach a problem."

Absolve: Ignore it, maybe it will go away

Resolve: Treat the symptoms

Solve: Treat the causes (Which of the three elevator solutions was Solve?)

Dissolve: Solve it in a way that the causes go away; they dissolve

To him, it appeared Dissolve was a beautiful version of Solve or a more intelligent and effort-filled version of Solve. He couldn't consciously explain it well enough that others could intentionally replicate it and that's a shame, because he knew that Solve only makes problems worse over time. Here are his perspectives on alcoholism and crime from FORTY YEARS AGO:

"Look at how alcoholism is treated. It is usually treated as a problem to be removed rather than as the alcoholic's solution to a serious personal problem. No wonder that when his ‘solution’ is denied him he often returns to it as soon as he can or develops other ‘solutions’ that are equally damaging. The alcoholic's original problem is usually left unsolved when he is denied alcohol or is induced to abstain."

"Problem solving is often directed at the removal of symptoms rather than causes. This is particularly true where society is involved. For example, we define crime as a social problem, and we attempt to solve it by removing the criminal from society. However, crime continues to rise, and mounting evidence shows that prisons make convicts more likely to commit further crimes when they are released. Thus it is increasingly apparent that crime is a symptom, not a disease, and that we have not been treating its causes adequately. In fact, the treatment is widely recognized as a major cause of the continuing problem."

His inability to intentionally Dissolve problems caused people to look to his Solve counterpart: W. Edward Deming and "continuous improvement" became all the rage in the 1980's. Yes, Analysis is perfect for problem solving equipment and projects, but we saw the cause of Racism and Sexism is using Analysis on people as a first step.

Yes, using Analysis on a process does improve it in the short term, however, it leads to a culture that stresses out its workers and lessens engagement. This approach is the same as adding elevators to the high rise building. It DOES Solve the immediate problem, however, the high rise owners will eventually go out of business from the lack of tenant revenue.

Dr. Ackoff showed how Synthesis would lead to worker happiness and engagement, while process experts who claim to be Dr. Ackoff experts still use an Analysis perspective and prevent the world from receiving the benefits Dr. Ackoff was able to achieve, but we will look at that next week. It's now time to find out the answer to the elevator problem.

The young man's idea was to install mirrors on every floor next to the elevators!

What?!?!

The issue was people were BORED, so they complained about the wait time. When mirrors were installed, people were entertained; they could look at themselves or look at other people. The wait time issue was DISSOLVED!

Last week, I said I LOVE to help Truth Savants get conscious answers. Here is the conscious explanation for Ackoff's metric:

Absolve: Ignore it, maybe it will go away

Resolve: Treat the EFFECTS

Solve: Treat the TANGIBLE causes

Dissolve: Treat the INTANGIBLE causes

Notice, ANYONE who wants to efficiently and effectively assess problems would not only want to learn this metric, they would want to know how to Dissolve people. How do you determine the intangible cause of every person's perspective? (I don't understand why Leaders wouldn't want to use two metrics that would keep them ahead of everyone else in the organization.)

If you only deal at the Solve level, you believe people are ROBOTS. (Notice, it's better than dealing at the Absolve or Resolve levels where you would believe people are inanimate objects or animals, respectively.) This means people who adamantly argue for applying Solve to people through Analysis are the source of all the continued problems in our world.

The key to Dissolve is to realize people are HUMANS. They are Unique! Here is a link to short video lining all of this out: Dissolve

Next Chapter: Dr. Russell Ackoff: Systems Thinking

Table of Contents

Are you one of the 1% of people who WANTS the Truth? These articles are forming a book on Generativity. If you are interested in going on this journey of Generativity, the first chapter is here:?Do You Really Want To Improve Mental Health?

The following is intended for people who either say they base their life on the Bible or know people who say they base their life on the Bible...

In the first chapter of II Chronicles, the word?madda?was used three times (in verses 10, 11, and 12). The word was translated as?knowledge?and spoke of what?Solomon?requested from God instead of riches, long life, and victory over his enemies. God recognized that Solomon requested a cause instead of these effects and God said He would give Solomon this cause as well as the effects.

In I Kings 3:5-15, the same story was told and the immediate application of this?madda?was seen. Beginning in verse 16, we see the story where?Solomon?got confronted by two women who both said the child was theirs. This story is the ideal place to see the different ways to deal with a problem.

Absolve: Ignore them so they will go away...and probably kill each other.

Resolve: Punish or kill them both for bothering the king

Solve: Interview the women and their friends to determine who is the mother. (Notice, this is going to take a lot of effort and there is still the possibility Solomon will reach a wrong conclusion...as well as this opening the door for more disputes to be brought to the king.)

Dissolve: Solomon?stated he would cut the baby in two! What!?!?

The two women immediately responded in verse 26:

Then the woman whose son?was?living spoke to the king, for?she yearned with compassion for her son; and she said, “O my lord, give her the living child, and by no means kill him!” But the other said, “Let him be neither mine nor yours,?but?divide?him.”

What did these two women state?

They stated their thought processes: their intangible causes.?Solomon?was then able to know FOR SURE which woman was the mother because he got to the intangible causes instead of looking for observable WHAT’s. In fact look at how the story ended:

So the king answered and said, “Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him; she?is?his mother.”?And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had rendered; and they feared the king, for they saw that the?wisdom of God?was?in him to administer justice.

Wow...it looks like Dissolve is the wisdom of God.