From the place I stay, there are two routes to reach a much frequented destination. 1- The Standard route ( shorter distance-wise, longer commuting time-wise) 2 – The Faster route ( longer distance-wise, shorter commuting time-wise) As is expected, the faster route is chosen. The other day, on Google Maps, for some reason, both routes showed the same estimated time. I still chose the so-called faster route. I believe most people would do that. Most Mumbaikars – as Mumbai residents are called – do the same thing when they are travelling by local trains. If the slow train is in front and the fast train is expected much later, they wait for the fast train even if both trains are expected to take the same time, or even if, the slow one is reaching earlier. Why? In their mind, people disregard the train waiting time and get a kick out of seeing the fast train breeze past the stations where it won’t make a halt. We let our minds trick us into feeling good! This got me thinking about the…
A superb critique of the case-study method by Russell Ackoff
In an interview, Russell Ackoff was asked about the case-study method of teaching. I present the question & Ackoff’s response Detrick – Business schools like to talk about the usefulness of cases as a teaching pedagogy. What do you think about using cases as a teaching vehicle? Ackoff – “A case is a terrible distortion of reality. It is like learning how to box with one hand tied behind you, then you are suddenly thrown into the ring with somebody who has two hands free. You don’t know what to do. You couldn’t box against a two handed person with one hand, but that’s what cases do to/for you. A problem is an abstraction. It’s extracted out of reality by analysis. Reality consists of complex sets of interacting problems, not isolated problems. So when we deal with a problem we’re already dealing with an abstraction — and now somebody comes along and deprives you of the information needed to formulate the problem. This converts the problem into an exercise. An exercise is a problem for which the person given the problem to…
Wanting what we measure
Isn’t it wonderful that we can measure the things that really matter in life and work?! Really straightforward, isn’t it? Not quite so, explains Russell Ackoff. Ackoff’s F/law Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. For example, those who want a high quality of work life but don’t know how to measure it, often settle for wanting a high standard of living because they can measure it. The tragedy is that they come to believe that quality of life and standard of living are the same thing. The fact is that further increases to an already high standard of living often reduces quality of life. Unfortunately and similarly, the ( unmeasurable) quality of products or services is taken to be proportional to their ( measurable) price. The price of a product or service, however, is usually proportional to the cost of producing it, not its quality: and this cost tends to be proportional to the relative incompetence of the organization that produces it. Like economists, managers place no value on…