Russ Ackoff's Idealised Planning and Aperture's 'Four Frames' Approach to Strategy Design... More than twenty-five years ago, the great Russ Ackoff identified three main types of approach to organisational planning: · ‘Reactive’ planning is ‘bottom-up’ and delves directly into the nuts and bolts of an organisation, focusing on individual components and processes in search of improvement in isolation. · ‘Preactive’ planning is ‘top-down’ and attempts to predict and control future events and behaviours, setting out strategic ‘road-maps’ or pre-set courses of action. · ‘Inactive’ planning attempts to muddle along, addressing day-to-day challenges as they come along and relying on the strengths of the organisation to prevail. We see these approaches in many if not most organisations around us today. The problem is, they are not well equipped to deal with the world of today, with its increasingly complex interdependence and increasingly rapid change. Complex, adaptive, purposeful systems do not respond favourably to prediction, reductionism, and isolationism. Ackoff offered ‘Interactive’ planning in an attempt to address his concerns about these mechanistic, pedestrian approaches. In his words, it ‘is directed at creating the future…by continuously closing the gap between where it is at any moment of time and where it would most like to be’ ('A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Idealised Design', May 2001). Aperture Strategy’s ‘Four Frames’ approach to strategy design and implementation takes much of its inspiration from Ackoff’s interactive planning methodology, but also incorporates a wide range of other ideas, theory, and experience drawn from eminent thinkers about systems and strategy. Get in touch to discuss how being an early adopter of our unique methodology could be game changing for your organisation. Aperture Strategy Ltd #systemsthinking. #strategydesign. #fourframes
Aperture Strategy Ltd
Strategic Management Services
Strategy and planning to connect your vision with the uncertainty of the world around you.
About us
You know your business. We know how to design, communicate, and manage strategy effectively. Your content, our process. Together we can be more than the sum of those parts. Aperture is different. We are a newly established strategy consultancy with fresh ideas and a novel and creative approach. We have a unique, innovative, and iterative approach to strategy which places your vision at the centre and then brings cohesion across your organisation, making allowance for changing circumstances over time. Our greatest love is the design and implementation of strategy. But we also provide a range of related business services from Organisational Change to Project Management. To us, strategy is a shared framework which sets out what needs to be done to bring about a particular desired condition over an extended period of time. Strategy is about how an organisation can best influence its environment in order to create the most favourable possible conditions. In order to fully understand the nature and extent of the problem, it should therefore be unconstrained by limitations of resources. The challenge for implementation includes finding creative ways in which activity can be coordinated and conducted to encourage or influence such change, taking into account practical as well as resource constraints. Speak to us about cost-effective and scalable packages of support to suit your requirements from the through-life design and implementation of your strategy to a single consultation about a specific issue.
- Website
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www.Aperture-Strategy.co.uk
External link for Aperture Strategy Ltd
- Industry
- Strategic Management Services
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- London, Hereford, Brighton
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2022
- Specialties
- Strategy Development, Operational Design, Project and Risk Management, and Special Projects
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London, Hereford, Brighton, GB
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Updates
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Delighted to have been invited to speak about systems-based strategy design at the Operational Research Society's annual conference at Bangor University in September. We're going to be talking about our 'Four Frames' methodology; a paradigm-shifting lens through which to view the challenges of strategy design and systems-influence. #aperturestrategy #fourframes #strategydesign #sensemaking #navigatingcomplexity #systemsthinking
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Aperture Strategy Book of the Month for July 2024 Stuart Russell, ‘Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control,’ Allen Lane, London, 2019 Stuart Russell speaks with authority about the potential for and the challenges of artificial intelligence. Having served as Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s council on AI and robotics as well as having founded the Center for Human Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley he takes a slightly different view of the human-machine relationship of the future from that of other experts in the field, such as Mustafa Suleyman and Nick Bostrom. Russell’s ‘Human Compatible’ is the Aperture Strategy book of the month for July 2024. The World Economic Forum is reported to have identified nearly three hundred separate efforts to develop ethical principles for AI. Whilst much of the discussion focuses on enforcement controls to avoid what is seen as existential risk, Russell advocates an approach based on ‘inverse reinforcement learning’. This involves machines learning about human preferences and boundaries and satisfy those as their purpose rather than optimising more hard-wired objectives. Russell’s thesis rests on allowing for uncertainty in the specification of objectives, on implicit rather than explicit definition of purpose, which may be counter-intuitive to many. It explores how AI interacts with society, economics, politics, and ethics, emphasising the complex interplay between elements, and focusing on the whole rather than individual components. Russell’s systems-thinking perspective offers a nuanced analysis of the challenges and opportunities posed by AI, and an insightful lens through which to view this complex issue. Echoing many of his colleagues, Russell acknowledges that such a philosophy should be adopted in short-order if it is to influence the accelerating implementation of AI technology, but that resolution seems to be cultural, not technical. For our small part, this certainly chimes with our own recent experience of research in AI support to systems-based strategy design. We highly recommend Russell’s book, which is even more compelling now than when it was published five years ago. #aperturestrategy #fourframes #strategydesign #sensemaking #navigatingcomplexity #systemsthinking
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Aperture Strategy Book of the Month for June 2024 Dan Davies, ‘The Unaccountability Machine’ (London: Profile Books, 2024) In our book of the month for June, economist, former investment banker, and journalist Dan Davies examines what he calls ‘the accountability sink’, the phenomenon of a human-centred system where rules and process prevent conditional judgement. More specifically, human intervention is blocked by an impenetrable and inflexible structure. Responsibility become impersonal and issues are distanced from leadership accountability. Davies offers two main drivers for ‘The Unaccountability Machine’: society’s increasing complexity and the single-minded quest for optimising profit and ‘shareholder value’. To counter this, he draws on the field of management cybernetics and Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model. Davies focuses on balancing the flow of information around the system, particularly with regard to identifying indicators and warnings that come from outside the preconceived model, worldview, or system design. One is reminded of the fallacious use of GDP as a measure of societal ‘good’. Davies’ polemic about private equity and orthodox economic theory risks diluting his core message but the thesis remains well argued, elegant, and intriguing. It clearly highlights the critical need for the management community to increase its systems awareness, engagement, and oversight. It also reinforces the principle of focusing on the interaction and connections between components to interact, influence, and intervene rather than the alternative – and more frequent – preoccupation with the components themselves. That’s systems thinking!
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Aperture Strategy Ltd reposted this
Aperture Book of the Month: May 2024 Although Steven Pinker is a somewhat controversial figure, his latest book, ‘Rationality’ is an erudite and entertaining canter through the concept and its significance to modern life. It's Aperture’s Book of the Month for May 2024. Pinker’s central argument is that human-kind is an essentially rational creature, albeit subject to flaws, bias, and motivated reasoning. Rationality is therefore not straightforward and depends on individual perspective and situation for its position. The book explores the relationship between rationality and reason, logic, and statistical representation, as well as the critical difference between probability and propensity. It also explains causal inference and decision-making in uncertainty. Pinker reminds us that ‘intelligence and expertise provide no immunity to cognitive infections’ and advocates an increased emphasis on educating and encouraging critical thinking. If nothing else, it makes one think. #ApertureStrategy #FourFrames #StrategyDesign #Sensemaking #NavigatingComplexity #SystemsThinking
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Aperture Book of the Month: May 2024 Although Steven Pinker is a somewhat controversial figure, his latest book, ‘Rationality’ is an erudite and entertaining canter through the concept and its significance to modern life. It's Aperture’s Book of the Month for May 2024. Pinker’s central argument is that human-kind is an essentially rational creature, albeit subject to flaws, bias, and motivated reasoning. Rationality is therefore not straightforward and depends on individual perspective and situation for its position. The book explores the relationship between rationality and reason, logic, and statistical representation, as well as the critical difference between probability and propensity. It also explains causal inference and decision-making in uncertainty. Pinker reminds us that ‘intelligence and expertise provide no immunity to cognitive infections’ and advocates an increased emphasis on educating and encouraging critical thinking. If nothing else, it makes one think. #ApertureStrategy #FourFrames #StrategyDesign #Sensemaking #NavigatingComplexity #SystemsThinking
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The philosopher Mary Midgley used to argue that Descartes separated the body from the soul to provide a safe space for science. After all, he was writing only a few decades after Bruno had died and only a few years after Galileo's trial. However, while understandable, that split sets in train a dualistic way of thinking that has done much damage and that we find again in the whole 'right is creative, left is logical' split brain myth. The popularity of this is ironic when natural science, in particular, our understanding of the role of the body and social environment in human consciousness and significant trends in biology are shifting away from taxonomies and, most definitely, from dichotomies into more integrated (but not integral) thinking. I blame, in part, the neo-platonists for a lot of this, and it's no coincidence that modern apologists for neo-platonism are into creating their own religions and attempting to gaslight the rest of us into thinking that there is a 'crisis of meaning 'so that we become believers. The world is as much a source of revelation and meaning as our imagination, and we need joined-up thinking, not the dichotomies of Manichæism, if we are going to address the material realities of the poly-crisis we face as a species. Separating logic from emotion (aside from being bad science), like separating the body from the soul, distracts from real engagement with the world, as does a very culturally specific focus on the magical mysticism of 'inner change' as a precondition for real change. All of this may explain the popularity of these movements, which have all the characteristics of 'end of days' religious movements in history. We need to be reconciled with each other and with the planet, and that comes from doing things collectively and at scale in social and environmental contexts, not attending workshops and seminars where we can be happy (and sometimes clappy) in the company of like-minded people.