George Mason University
MS1B2
Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444
"sum, ergo cogito"
© John N. Warfield, 1996
The Harold Lasswell Model
of Design, Decision, and Learning
Environments
in the form of a journal article
"sum, ergo cogito"
© John N. Warfield, 1996
|
THE CORPORATE OBSERVATORIUM:
John N. Warfield
The prevalence of complexity is a fact of life in virtually all large organizations. However the ways in which organizations try to manage that complexity are largely out of touch with relevant scholarly results. Instead management actions are still overly-governed by fads. This phenomenon has been described by Russell Ackoff as "panacea overload". The late Harold Lasswell recognized a critical aspect of the management of complexity (essentially ignored in academia and in the political scene), when he proposed the development of the "social planetarium", and (later) the "urban planetarium" back in the days when cities were in turmoil through the U. S. A. That proposal, with some modifications, is the basis for the concept of the "corporate observatorium". It is a piece of real estate, whose building interior can be loosely compared with that of the Louvre, in that it contains a variety of rooms, and facilitates rapid familiarization with their contents by the persons who walk through that property. Further analogy comes from the recognition of the importance of wall displays (with electronic adjuncts), large enough in size to preclude any necessity to truncate communications; and tailored to help eradicate or minimize complexity in understanding, both broadly and in depth, the nature of the large organization, its problems, its vision, and its ongoing efforts to resolve its difficulties. Comparison with the planetarium for envisaging a broad swatch of the sky is self-evident. Seven critical forms of representation of complexity will be described briefly. Their significance in sustaining communication and organizational continuity via the corporate observatorium will be indicated. Potential application in higher education will also be briefly described.
SUSTAINING MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION AND CONTINUITY IN THE AGE OF COMPLEXITY
John N. Warfield
In June of 1988, Professor Henry Alberts of the Defense Systems Management College, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, conducted an "Interactive Management Workshop" (Warfield and Cárdenas, 1994) on the subject "What do Technical Managers Do?" The participants in this activity were experienced program managers who oversee very large and expensive military systems development.
A little over eight years later, Professor Alberts walked down the aisle in London to receive his Ph. D. degree, majoring in systems science. This degree was awarded as a result of an extensive period of intermediate work that began in 1988, as indicated above, and culminated in 1994 with the passage of U. S. Public Law 103-355, the "Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994." A large number of Interactive Management Workshops managed by Professor Alberts provided the intermediate outcomes required.
There was little or no expectation in 1988 that the entire U. S. defense acquisition system could be systematically redesigned nor, if it could be, that such a design could find its way through the political establishment and replace mountains of prior U. S. code under which military acquisition had become the subject of intense distrust and large waste of resources.
Still, this work had answered "yes" to the following question:
Having observed what had to be produced to comprehend and design such a large system,
inevitably serious questions ensued, of which the following is of great present interest:
This question may, also, have a positive answer. It may well be possible for many people to
learn what is involved in designing, operating, and amending such a large system and,
actually to understand in depth how it works. If so, there is every reason to believe that
the means of achieving this can be adapted, with minimal conceptual change, to many
other systems of importance to society. It is with this belief in mind, that the concept of
"corporate observatorium" is set forth here.
Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) was a political scientist, one of the foremost authorities in that field. As a faculty member, he taught law and political science at the University of Chicago, Yale, and elsewhere. Author of many books and papers, he originated key ideas relevant to the effective design and understanding of public policy, which remain essentially dormant today. One of his key views he expressed as follows: "Our traditional patterns of problem-solving are flagrantly defective in presenting the future in ways that contribute insight and understanding" The Lasswell Triad is responsive to this view, in part. It consists of these three concepts:
The Situation Room. First, a special facility needs to be put in place, where people can work together on design of complex policy (or other) issues, and where the display facilities have been carefully designed into the facility, so that they provide prominent ways for the participants to work with the future "in ways that contribute insight and understanding". The Prelegislature. Second, this special facility should be used extensively to develop high-quality designs long before legislatures or corporate bodies ever meet to try to resolve some complex issue facing them by designing a new system (e.g., this is a sensible way to go about designing a health-care system to which the political establishment can repair for insights and such modifications as seem essential). The Observatorium. Once the design has been accepted, the observatorium is designed and established so that people can walk through a sequential learning experience, in which they gain both an overview and an in-depth understanding of the system that has been designed and which, most likely, will be prominent in their own lives. The observatorium is a piece of real estate, whose building interior can be loosely compared with that of the Louvre, in that it contains a variety of rooms, and facilitates rapid familiarization with their contents by the persons who walk through that property. Further analogy comes from the recognition of the importance of wall displays (with electronic adjuncts), large enough in size to preclude any necessity to truncate communications; and tailored to help eradicate or minimize complexity in understanding, both broadly and in depth, the nature of the large organization, its problems, its vision, and its ongoing efforts to resolve its difficulties. Comparison with the planetarium for envisaging a broad swatch of the sky is self-evident. The descriptions just given represent only modest deviations from the Lasswell Triad, but slight changes in nomenclature have been adopted for purposes of this paper. Given that relatively little has been done with the Lasswell Triad, two questions might arise. The first might be: "Why?". Another might be, "Are there additions that have to be made that, when integrated with the Lasswell Triad, provide a practical means for enhancing greatly the design, management, amendment, and understanding of large, complex systems? This last question will now be answered: "Yes".
It would, therefore, be important to have conceived and created the situation room required for effective group work, and to have conducted the necessary prelegislative activity to provide the raw display information for the observatorium. A situation room of the type desired was developed in 1980, and has since been put into place in a variety of locations (Warfield, 1994). Rooms of this type provided the environment for the Alberts work, and for many other applications of Interactive Management (Warfield and Cárdenas, 1994). Thus the first essential preparation for the observatorium is complete. The Alberts application, and other ongoing applications have and are providing the second essential raw display information. What kinds of displays are required for the observatorium? These displays must meet stringent communication requirements. In brief, they must meet the demands of complexity for effective representation. This means, among other things, that they must be large, and they must cater to human visual requirements.
The Lasswell Triad clearly relies for its adoption and use, upon the availability of ways of representing complexity that place it within the realm of human comprehension. There is a long-established penchant among scientists of all varieties to place everything possible in mathematical or numerical terms. Depending on the specific mathematics chosen, and the numerical forms adopted, the potential learner group for such representations is greatly reduced. Does this mean that only the mathematically-educated or the numerically adept can fill effective citizenship roles in a democracy, where public understanding is necessary for good decisions? A prolonged study of complexity (Warfield, 1994) establishes that it is high-quality, graphical communication means which must be used if large, complex systems of the type studied by Alberts can be brought within the grasp of ordinary mortals. Literally dozens of such defense-acquisition-specific representations were developed by Alberts and they provide the raw material which, if introduced appropriately into a "defense acquisition system observatorium" could provide the sequenced pattern of learning that even the Congress would require in order to understand the system beyond the confines of a few of their committees. Prose alone is inadequate to portray complexity. Mathematics is often unavailable because mathematical language is restricted to a small percent of the population. For this reason, language components comprised of integrated prose-graphics representations enjoy unique potential for representing complexity. Because of the desirability of taking advantage of computers to facilitate the development and production of such integrated representations, it is best if the prose-graphics representations are readily representable in computer algorithms, even if their utility for general communication is limited. Mappings from mathematical formats to graphical formats can often be readily done, although manual modification of graphics for readibility may be necessary. The following specific graphical representations have proved useful in representing complexity:
All of the scientifically-based representational types have been thoroughly explained, and many examples of their use in a wide variety of applications are available (Warfield, 1994). Most of these types were used in the Alberts dissertation (Alberts, 1995), and can be seen there as they related specifically to defense system acquisition. The same types were used to explore in a student design course, the redesign of a large systems curriculum (Cárdenas and Rivas, 1995), and to explore high-level design activities at Ford Motor Company, where aspects of the graphics representations facilitate computation of numerical indexes of complexity (Staley, 1995). The exploration of the large systems curriculum can, itself, be a prototype for exploitation in academia, to open up curricula (e.g., public policy curricula currently heavily oriented to "policy analysis") to activities such as large-system design.
The first step in resolving issues related to large, complex systems, is to provide a well- designed situation room, equipped to enable groups to work together effectively. The second step is to carry out whatever prolonged design work is required, using processes proven to be effective, yielding visual displays of the system patterns that hold understanding of the logic underlying the system. The third step is to embed the results of the second step in the corporate observatorium, where insight into the large, complex system comes both at overview and detailed levels, according to the efforts put forth to comprehend what is seen in the sequenced displays. The first two steps have been accomplished in a variety of settings. It remains to take up the challenge to develop the first corporate observatorium which may then become a prototype for its successors.
Ackoff, R. L. (1995), "'Whole-ing' the Parts and Righting the Wrongs", Systems Research12(1), 43-46. Alberts, H. C. (1995), "Redesigning the United States Defense Acquisition System", Ph. D. Dissertation, Department of Systems Science, City University, London, United Kingdom. Cárdenas, A. R. and Rivas, J. C. (1995), "Teaching Design and Designing Teaching", in Integrated Design and Process Technology, (A. Ertas, C. V. Ramamoorthy, M. M. Tanik, I. I. Esat, F. Veniali, and Taleb-Bendiab, Editors), IDPT-Vol. 1, 111-116. Lasswell, H. D., 1960. "The Techniques of Decision Seminars". Midwest Journal of Political Science 4, 213-236. Lasswell, H. D., 1963. "The Future of Political Science", New York: Atherton Press. Lasswell, H. D., 1971. "A Pre-View of the Policy Sciences", New York: American Elsevier. Staley, S.M. (1995), "Complexity Measurements of Systems Design", in Integrated Design and Process Technology, (A. Ertas, C. V. Ramamoorthy, M. M. Tanik, I. I. Esat, F. Veniali, and Taleb-Bendiab, Editors), IDPT-Vol. 1, 153-161. U. S. House of Representatives Report 103-712, Public Law 103-355, "Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994"; August 21, 1994. Warfield, J. N., 1976. "Societal Systems: Planning, Policy, and Complexity". New York: Wiley. Warfield, J. N., 1994. "A Science of Generic Design", 2nd Edition. Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press. Warfield, J. N. and Cárdenas, A. Roxana (1994), "A Handbook of Interactive Management", Ames, IA: The Iowa State University Press.
John N. Warfield is University Professor and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the
Integrative Sciences (IASIS) at George Mason University (GMU), a state university, in Fairfax,
Virginia. IASIS is a component of the Institute of Public Policy (TIPP) at GMU.
He received the A.B. degree, the B. S. in Electrical Engineering, and the M. S. in Electrical
Engineering from the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1948, 1948, and 1949, respectively. He received the Ph. D. degree from Purdue University (West Lafayette) in 1952, majoring in electronic communications.
He has 38 years of university faculty service, of which the past 12 years have been at GMU.
He has spent a total of 20 years as a faculty member in Virginia, and during that time has had the designation "eminent scholar" in the Virginia system. He has about 10 years of industrial
experience: Director of Research, Wilcox Electric Company (1965-66); Senior Research Leader,
Battelle Memorial Institute (1968-74); Senior Manager, Burroughs Corporation, (1983-84). This
experience included research of both theoretical and experimental nature, electronic development and reliability testing of navigational equipment for jet aircraft, and management experience in overseeing research projects and industry-university contracts.
He has served as elected President of the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and is a Life Fellow of that organization. He has served as elected President of the Society for General Systems Research (later renamed the International Society of Systems Sciences). He served 9 years as founding editor of Systems Research and 4 years as editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.
He is the author of two U. S. patents on electronic equipment, and is the inventor of Interpretive
Structural Modeling, Interactive Management, and Generic Design Science.
He is sole author of four books, co-author of another book, and co-translator of a classic German work on communication networks. He is author or co-author of over 100 papers. He is in demand as a speaker and collaborator outside the United States where his research contributions are well-known, has presented this work in ten nations, and has taught one-week short courses in five of them.
His primary activities in the past few years have involved preparing two books for publication in
1994, authoring papers, presenting papers at conferences, teaching short courses, and serving as an information resource or an active participant in working with individuals who are seriously dedicated to improving quality, effectiveness, efficiency, communication, and organizational cultures in their various organizations. He is presently preparing a new book manuscript titled: The Work Program of Complexity: From Origins to Outcomes. Biographical sketches of Warfield can be found in American Men and Women of Science, Who's Who in Engineering, Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology, and Who's Who in America.
|
