Ackoff's 'The Cake'

New book: Ackoff's F/laws: The Cake by Russell L. Ackoff (with Herbert J. Addison). Russ Ackoff’s witty and subversive  122 F/laws of Management are widely respected and cover areas like hierarchy, teams, innovation, motivation and management. This book brings them together in a single source.

Growing Wings on the Way: Systems Thinking for Messy Situations

New systems book by Rosalind Armson 'Growing Wings on the Way: Systems Thinking for Messy Situations'. With some problems it’s hard to know where to start – we can’t define them, we get in a muddle thinking about them, we may try to ignore some aspect/s of them and – when we finally do something – they usually get worse. Rosalind Armson is one of the world’s foremost teachers and practitioners of Systems Thinking, and her remarkable book explains how these messes happen and what to do about them.

This book is about dealing with messes. Sometimes known as 'wicked problems', messes (or messy situations) are fairly easy to spot:

  • it's hard to know where to start
  • we can't define them
  • everything seems to connect to everything else and depends on something else having been done first
  • we get in a muddle thinking about them
  • we often try to ignore some aspect/s of them
  • when we finally do something about them, they usually get worse
  • they're so entangled that our first mistake is usually to try and fix them as we would fix a simple problem.

Stratfor

For those interested in geo-political systems analysis, Stratfor is offering a range of information services, including their free Intelligence Reports.

Masters: Systems Thinking at Open University

New Masters Program in "Systems Thinking in Practice" now underway at the Open University (UK)

Work of John Bowlby

The International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) was commissioned to produce a report on the work of John Bowlby of Stanford and the Tavistock Institute. The report is available here.

System Dynamics assistance?

Looking for help with System Dynamics in general or Vensim? There are two forums recommended by Bob Eberlein.

Systems Books

A new addition to the website is a listing of systems books via 'Publications on the menu on the left.

Please feel free to add more books or email me the details of any that you feel are useful for people to know about (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. )

Best wishes,

Terry

Systems Thinking eBook


Systems Thinking and Associated Methodologies by Prof Bill Hutchinson is now available as a pdf eBook from Praxis Education ($4.99) from www.praxiseducation.com/catalog/ebooks-c-28.html