REPLY Society Strategy Development (SD7100)

[SDMAIL Jack Harich]

Posted by  Jack Harich <jack at thwink2.org>


SDMAIL Kim Warren wrote:
> Sorry this process has been quiet for some weeks. I was somewhat taken 
> aback that we had only a short flurry of responses to the original 
> request to hear people's aspirations for the field, after which the 
> trickle of ideas dried up.
>  
> Given the strong interest and commitment from so many in the 
> community, this is quite a puzzle, so I have been trying to understand 
> what is going on.

I found it puzzling too. I expected a torrent of ideas, but instead I 
just counted the replies actually suggesting possible goals. There were 
about 16.


> Subsequent enquiries have identified some possible reasons for this:
> (long snip of the reasons)
Allow me to add another possibility: The Society has elected managers. 
In business, it's typically the managers who set goals and visions, with 
appropriate amounts of input from employees, customers, consultants, 
stockholders, etc as needed. If a business manager sent out a request 
for "what should our goals be" they would be seen as sending a mixed 
signal. Setting goals/visions is management's job, not everyone's. 
Trying to rely on a vast membership to provide the primary input for 
setting goals is the equivalent of management by committee.

Thus many list members may hold back, because they see that the managers 
will be providing the bulk of the goals anyhow. That's their job. Why 
duplicate their work?

For example, unless I missed something, where are the goal suggestions 
from the founder of the field, the president of the Society, the author 
of the leading textbook in the field, and the  wizards at Vensim, my 
preferred SD modeling tool?

The Society's managers and those who do the real work are sharp. They 
have spoken out very little on this topic. When I noticed this, I 
assumed it was because they already had their own goal ideas, and would 
be inputting them at a later step in the process.

Now I see this is indeed the case. A "strategy group" will take it from 
here. I would assume that those at the top and in the know will find it 
easy to input their ideas directly to the strategy group. This is how 
it's done in business and government.

>  
> Meanwhile, all direct contributions to the strategy itself are welcome 
> - where we should be trying to get to and how to get there.

I'm puzzled. Does this mean we have moved from goal brainstorming to 
strategy formulation? Since strategy is a high level plan to achieve a 
goal, how can we strategize if the goal remains unknown?

It could be that the Society currently lacks the ability to set firm, 
high quality long term goals and instead should settle for loose, 
temporary goals. These can be iteratively improved until they suffice.


Hope this helps,

SDMAIL Kim Warren wrote:

> The question we started on some months ago was ... “ What achievements 
> would make you – and [importantly] outside observers - feel that 
> celebrating progess of the field is totally justified, and how would 
> you measure each of those achievements? ... “ I hope it was clear how 
> answers to this question would form the essential first part of the 
> strategy-development process outlined above. If we don't know where we 
> want to get to, it's going to be tough knowing what to do to get there.
>
> To make this more concrete for you, I can share the types of outcome 
> that emerged in a project I am carrying out for another professional 
> body right now. Their answers included e.g.
> - XXX Universities offering recognised courses in the subject,
> - XXX graduating students per year,
> - XXX job adverts per year specifying that candidates must possess the 
> capability and/or qualification - the existence of a certified 
> training program [with specified content], and Chartered status for 
> experts ['Chartered' status is a publicly recognised stamp of 
> professional achievement in the UK and elsewhere, separate from 
> University degree qualifications],
> - XXX Certified and XXX Chartered practitioners in the field,
> - XXX Professors of the subject, - a library of XXX powerful case 
> studies of professional use of the subject, of which YYY are under 3 
> years old,
> - XXX citations per year in the general press regarding the profession 
> and its work,
> - Govt specification that the method is required in relevant contract 
> awards,
> .. etc. etc.
Kim, you've got a tough job. Let me try to help. What follows is not a 
reflection on you, but on something else:

This is a list of quantitative goals. If it's meant to be an example for 
the Society to follow, I find the example troubling because it is not 
customer oriented. It's supplier oriented. It's like the factory manager 
who measures success in terms of how much rolls out the door.

Better would be the various things that are important to the customer. 
For example, that's why I mentioned the possible goal of "the ability to 
reliably solve large, pressing social problems." Capabilities like that, 
along with cost, quality, speed, etc, are what's important to the 
customer. Everything else is of lesser importance and is at most a subgoal.

Who is our customer? The above goal implies it's whoever is trying to 
solve large, pressing social problems.

Such customers care little about how many students are graduating per 
year with a certain skill. What they do care about, more than anything 
else, is "Does that skill work? Can it solve my problems? If it can, I 
don't care what academia is pumping out, because my staff can learn it 
if there's not enough grads or certified practitioners."

A similar argument could be made for everything on the list. Even the 
least academic centric one of them all, government requirement of the 
method, is not customer centric and hence doesn't matter much at all. If 
a method is productive, suppliers are going to be using it, whether or 
not the method is required.

There's another way to put all this: The above is a list of symptoms of 
achieving a higher goal. If the Society tried to achieve the above 
goals, it would be guilty of violating its own principle of Don't Treat 
the Symptoms - Treat the Underlying Cause.


Shifting gears slightly, there appear to be different views of "Who is 
the customer?" I see the customer as those who are trying to solve 
difficult social problems. These problems are so tough they frequently 
require tools like systems thinking and dynamic modeling. The customer 
needs the insights those models can provide.

But the above list of goals and many (most?) of the goal suggestions see 
the customer as the Society's members. The Society exists to serve them. 
Given that viewpoint, it's quite natural to measure success in terms of 
academic program success.

But as our own exemplar shows us, that's not how it works in the real 
world. In the Beer Distribution Game, if the beer factory measures 
success in terms of its own costs and how much it rolls out the door, it 
stumbles. Quite badly.

But if that factory puts its systems thinking cap on, looks at the whole 
system, and realizes the system exists to serve the customer, then the 
factory can do well. Quite well.

So who is the customer?

Jack
Posted by  Jack Harich <jack at thwink2.org>
posting date  Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:20:19 -0400