Russell L. Ackoff

which meant the consumer's behavior was also changing.

So we've been talking here at the intersection of complicated and complex, and it was Russell Ackoff who in the 70s coined the term puzzle problems messes in the context of complex problem solving.

And one of Russell Ackoff's themes was not that complexity, in his terms messes, were inherently unapproachable and unnavigable, But the breaking a mess down into parts and trying to solve the parts and expecting the larger complexity to resolve as you did so was a bit of a trap.

And he would suggest, Ackoff would suggest that independently solving constituent problems can intensify a mess, can intensify the complexity because the problems interact.

Could you expand on this theme some more?

Yeah, I love that story, dude.

So systems thinking is a quick kind of, you know, what is it? Kind of how do we get into it? Systems thinking is a system is a function of its parts that all come together to do something to create an outcome, right? That's kind of like the loose meadows, Ackoff kind of definition type of thing.

But like you said, dude, there was like, operations and there's marketing and there's engineering and like they're all they're all part of the system that's trying to deliver something of value to the customer and just the stuff you did is like uh how do we understand how what i do over here influences over there you know to be like more concrete um I'm sure everybody that went through a cloud migration, it didn't just impact infrastructure.

It impacted everybody.

So this is a big point.

You know, there's a couple of leading nerds like me will know of Deming and, uh, Ackoff and leading system thinkers and, and my lived experience sort of backs up these points, which is effectively if you focus on the local optimization of parts, whether that's the parts of an individual practice like we talked about, or the parts of a lo- of a regional system.

If you just focus on optimizing each individual part, you'll end up with, um, sort of global loss for the whole.

Okay.