For nearly fifty years the US and the Soviet Union "planned forward",
projecting trend lines from the "present situation" and asking exactly the
questions you framed for us. Events have proved that neither country
accurately predicted the future, and the cost to both nations and all the
peoples of the world has been staggering. If, instead, representatives
from both countries had sat down and asked "what would we like the world
to look like in 2000?", there would have been serious differences - but
there would have been huge areas of agreement. The two governments could
then have asked, "what actions do we need to take between now and then to
make such an outcome likely?"
Kent Myers wrote:
The character of the goal state, and one's assumption about what a proper
goal state is, can kick back on one's choice of a forward or backward
orientation. If the goal is easily described, it is probably more natural
to backward plan. If the goal is uncertain, there is a tendency to move
instead from what is better known -- the current state. The more
uncertain the goal state, the greater tendency to not move at all but to
luxuriate in descriptions of the current system.
(I'm sure we all agree that moving both back and forward to find a
strategy is best. My beef is with people who will only move forward as a
matter of principle, or those who will not move at all as a matter of
practice, indirectly encouraged by the principle of forward motion.)
________________
Despite the fact we are aiming from opposite ends of the planning spectrum, I
think we actually agree that:
- planning is a continuum requiring both forward and backward planning
- formulating the goal state probably requires more forward planning
- achieving the goal state probably requires more backward planning
The key issue underlying all this is that examination is required of the
underlying mental models. Why was there an arms race between the US and
USSR - simplistically speaking, because neither side would entertain the
belief that could be a world where the two nations could live peacefully
together (this is kinda like the "Beer Game" that has been discussed on
this list before).
RAND have come up with a technique called Assumption-Based Planning who's
expressed purpose is to uncover at least some of the underlying
assumptions behind the planning process (this applies to both forward and
backward planning). I understand that Assumption-Based Planning is similar
to the scenario technique used by Royal Dutch/Shell, and I'm not sure how
similar it is to the IBIS work from the 70s.
The problem with this approach is how do you uncover implicit assumptions
- for example, that only one of the democratic or communist systems could
emerge the winner. Many of these assumptions are almost "tacit knowledge"
and are only obvious in hindsight or from an outsiders perspective. How do
you capture these assumptions? Jeff Conklin has written an excellent paper
on Organizational Memory that states that one of the problems with reusing
document based organisational memories is how do you document all the
assumptions required to put a document in context?
The key to a learning organisation is how do you think like someone else,
how do you acquire and evaluate someone else (like a competitor's)
assumptions for doing business, how do you compare these assumptions to
your own business' assumptions, how do you incorporate the assumptions
behind good ideas like TQM and BPR and incorporate them into your
business' assumptions (in a way that makes sense).
If we follow this through, we are no longer simply talking about
information flows, and processes, instead we are talking about how to
build and rebuild mental models. This is a scary concept on an
organisational scale (based on the way we "work" today).
-- John O'Neill DSTO C3 Research Centre, Australia email: jao@itd.dsto.gov.au