REPLY Separate Professional Conference (SD6303)

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Posted by  Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble at wanadoo.fr>

Hi Mike and Richard

Mike noted that there was already a Business S.I.G..
There are actually 28 members in this group that is not very active;
One post now and then, with answers sometimes.
Many members have given neither their curriculum nor even their names.
There are four or five active members, I can name three, Ralf Lippold , Kim
Warren and me.

Two models have been posted, one in English from me, and another one in
French from me too. (If the model in French had interested someone I would
have translated it).

I thought that both models could interest somebody: one was describing a
business built on a bubble, and was calculating the time and the conditions
of the collapse etc. 

The other one was using SD to calculate the cost of a car.

I never had any feed back from both models.

I do not know if the subjects were not interesting, if the models were just
plain wrong or not well documented. I just had no feed back. I would have
preferred somebody telling me that it was pure rubbish, than having no
appreciation.

Somebody lately from the Sig asked me to post a model I had been talking
about. But why should I take the time to translate the model, write an accompanying
paper, just to have no answers?

I say that because there is a difference between words and actions.
Talking is easy, doing is difficult.

And I think that in this thread there is a lot of talking and not very much
of doing.

About the opposition between academics, consultants and final users
(generally not considered!), preferably to trying to build a week and
illusory consensus between different and legitimate worldviews, leading to
weak actions or no actions at all, it would be better to recognize the
differences and learn to act positively without that consensus.

Good methods seem to exist in the soft system thinking; SODA and especially
SSM that help people with different worldviews, act positively without having to
negate their ideas by a consensus.

I do not know how SSM works practically but there are certainly in the SD
community people that use these methods.

About the reflections of Richard, I share his ideas about the difficulty to
motivate consultants or even business people to inform other people about their
expertise.

First of all, it is difficult to interest someone about a subject he is not
by his current work interested in.

Secondly businesses people do not sell SD, they use it.

For instance nobody will care if I publish a paper at the SD conference,
professionally speaking. I do not mind being or not recognized by the profession, I just
use SD and like the field but SD is not my profession. If I publish anything I have been working
on, it will probably interest extremely few people. I never saw any
reference to revenue management browsing the papers from past SD conferences
(except one apart from mine and very short), and if it interests someone, it
is at the risk of stealing my work, without any compensation. (Big service
companies spend a lot of money to define coherent pricing strategy and I
think that the revenue management field would profit from the SD
methodology).

Why should I bother?
Being still optimistic, I urge Richard Stevenson, to manifest himself at the
Business S.I.G.
That may be a first little step.
Regards to everybody.
Jean-Jacques Laublé.
Posted by  Jean-Jacques Laublé <jean-jacques.lauble at wanadoo.fr>
posting date  Sun, 25 Feb 2007 18:20:30 +0100