Ett företag är ett system. Det vill säga ”en helhet som består av delar, som var och en kan påverka systemets egenskaper”. Varje del av systemet är beroende av andra delar för att kunna påverka systemet. Prestationsförmågan hos ett system (företag) beror på hur delarna passar ihop, inte på hur de fungerar var och en för sig.
Dr. Russell Ackoff berättar om systemsynen på förbättringsarbete. Vikten av – eller rättare sagt nödvändigheten av att förbättra hela systemet istället för att fokusera på delarna.
Några citat från Dr. Russell Ackoffs föredrag
- The definition of quality has to do with meeting or exceeding customer expectaions. If their expectations are not met, it’s a failure.
- A system is a whole that consists of parts, each of which can effect it’s behaviour or it’s properties. Each part of the system, when it effects the system, is dependent for it’s effect on some other part. In other words the parts are interdependent.
- A system is a whole that cannot be devided into independent parts.
- The essential or defining properties of any system are properties of the whole which none of it’s parts have.
- When a system is taken apart it loses it’s essential properties.
- A system is not a sum of the behaviours of it’s parts, it’s a product of their interactions.
- The performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not on how they act taken seperately.
- When you get rid of something you don’t want, you don’t necessarily get what you do want. So finding deficiencies and getting rid of them is not a way of improving performance of a system.
- Basic principle: An improvement program must be directed at what you want, not at what you don’t want. And determining what you want requires you to redesign the system not for the future but right not and ask yourself what would you do right now if you could do whatever you wanted to. Because if you don’t know what you would do if you could do whatever you wanted to, how in the world can you know what you can do under constraints?
- Continous improvement isn’t nearly as important as discontinous improvement. Creativity is a discontinuity. A creative act breaks with the chain that’s come before. It’s not continuous.