"To be guided in one's decisions by the present, and to prefer what is sure to what is uncertain (though more attractive), is an expedient, a narrow rule of policy. Not thus do states nor even individual men make their way to greatness." (Marquis de Vauvenargues, "Reflections and Maxims", cca. 1746)
"An adjustive effort of any kind is preceded by a decision to act or not act along a given line, and the decision is itself preceded by a definition of the situation, that is to say, an interpretation, or point of view, and eventually a policy and a behavior pattern. In this way quick judgments and decisions are made at every point in everyday life. Thus when approached by a man or beast in a lonely spot we first define the situation, make a judgment, as to whether the object is dangerous or harmless, and then decide ('make up our mind') what we are going to do about it." (William I Thomas, "Primitive Behavior", 1937)
"A policy therefore might be likened to strategy, the broad, overall, long term conception which gives direction and purpose to the tactics of immediately daily operations and decisions." (Lawrence K. Frank, "National Policy for the Family", 1948)
"The concern of OR with finding an optimum decision, policy, or design is one of its essential characteristics. It does not seek merely to define a better solution to a problem than the one in use; it seeks the best solution... [It] can be characterized as the application of scientific methods, techniques, and tools to problems involving the operations of systems so as to provide those in control of the operations with optimum solutions to the problems." (C West Churchman et al, "Introduction to Operations Research", 1957)
"[System dynamics] is an approach that should help in important top-management problems [...] The solutions to small problems yield small rewards. Very often the most important problems are but little more difficult to handle than the unimportant. Many [people] predetermine mediocre results by setting initial goals too low. The attitude must be one of enterprise design. The expectation should be for major improvement [...] The attitude that the goal is to explain behavior; which is fairly common in academic circles, is not sufficient. The goal should be to find management policies and organizational structures that lead to greater success." (Jay W Forrester, "Industrial Dynamics", 1961)
"Organization is not neutral in its effect upon policy, and those who hold power do not lightly relinquish is." (Stephan K. Bailey, "Agenda For the Nation", 1968)
"Policy-making, decision-taking, and control: These are the three functions of management that have intellectual content." (Anthony S Beer, "Management Science" , 1968)
"In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system." (Jay W Forrester, "Urban dynamics", 1969)
"In his search for elegance the management scientist has hindered his ability to participate in solving policy problems. [...] The management scientist must be prepared to forego elegance, to adjust his technique to the problem rather than searching for problems that fit the technique." (Henry Mintzberg, "The Nature of Managerial Work", 1973)
"Given that the structure of an econometric model consists of optimal decision rules of economic agents, and that optimal decision rules vary systematically with changes in the structure of series relevant to the decision maker, it follows that any change in policy will systematically alter the structure of econometric models." (Robert Lucas, 1976)
"Perhaps the fault [for the poor implementation record for models] lies in the origins of managerial model-making - the translation of methods and principles of the physical sciences into wartime operations research. [...] If hypothesis, data, and analysis lead to proof and new knowledge in science, shouldn’t similar processes lead to change in organizations? The answer is obvious-NO! Organizational changes (or decisions or policies) do not instantly pow from evidence, deductive logic, and mathematical optimization." (Edward B Roberts, "Interface", 1977)
"Executive stress is difficult to overstate when there is a conflict among policy restrictions, near-term performance, long-term good of the company, and personal survival." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)
"It is a paradox that the greater the decentralization, the greater the need for both leadership and explicit policies from the top management." (Bruce Henderson, "Henderson on Corporate Strategy", 1979)
"It makes little sense to subject all employees to training programs, to personnel policies, and to supervision designed for one group of employees, and in particular designed, as so many of the policies are, for yesterday's typical entrant into the labor forcethe fifteen or sixteen year old without any experience. More and more we will have to have personnel policies that fit the person rather than bureaucratic convenience or tradition." (Peter F Drucker, "Management in Turbulent Times", 1980)
"One critical source of knowledge is an understanding of how your organization formulates policies." (Dale E Zand, "Information, Organization, and Power", 1981)
"Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives." (George B Dantzig, "Mathematical Programming: The state of the art", 1983)
"The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: (1) the choice of an objective function denning the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decisionmaker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function." (Kenneth Arrow, "The Economics of Information", 1984)
"Every organizational policy solves certain problems and generates others." (Judith M Bardwick, "The Plateauing Trap", 1986)
"A strong corporate culture is the invisible hand that guides how things are done in an organization. The phrase, 'You just can't do that here', is extremely powerful, more so than any written rules or policy manuals." (Andrew S Grove, "One-On-One With Andy Grove", 1987)
"A model for simulating dynamic system behavior requires formal policy descriptions to specify how individual decisions are to be made. Flows of information are continuously converted into decisions and actions. No plea about the inadequacy of our understanding of the decision-making processes can excuse us from estimating decision-making criteria. To omit a decision point is to deny its presence - a mistake of far greater magnitude than any errors in our best estimate of the process." (Jay W Forrester, "Policies, decisions and information sources for modeling", 1994)
"Management is not founded on observation and experiment, but on a drive towards a set of outcomes. These aims are not altogether explicit; at one extreme they may amount to no more than an intention to preserve the status quo, at the other extreme they may embody an obsessional demand for power, profit or prestige. But the scientist's quest for insight, for understanding, for wanting to know what makes the system tick, rarely figures in the manager's motivation. Secondly, and therefore, management is not, even in intention, separable from its own intentions and desires: its policies express them. Thirdly, management is not normally aware of the conventional nature of its intellectual processes and control procedures. It is accustomed to confuse its conventions for recording information with truths-about-the-business, its subjective institutional languages for discussing the business with an objective language of fact and its models of reality with reality itself." (Stanford Beer, "Decision and Control", 1994)
"To attain quality, it is well to begin by establishing the 'vision' for the organization, along with policies and goals. Conversion of goals into results (making quality happen) is then done through managerial processes - sequences of activities that produce the intended results."
"[...] information feedback about the real world not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames and decision rules but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, processed and interpreted by a different decision rule, now yields a different decision. Altering the structure of our systems then alters their patterns of behavior. The development of systems thinking is a double-loop learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view and then redesign our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"To avoid policy resistance and find high leverage policies requires us to expand the boundaries of our mental models so that we become aware of and understand the implications of the feedbacks created by the decisions we make. That is, we must learn about the structure and dynamics of the increasingly complex systems in which we are embedded." (John D Sterman, "Business dynamics: Systems thinking and modeling for a complex world", 2000)
"The key element of an organization is not a building or a set of policies and procedures; organizations are made up of people and their relationships with one another. An organization exists when people interact with one another to perform essential functions that help attain goals."
"Deep change in mental models, or double-loop learning, arises when evidence not only alters our decisions within the context of existing frames, but also feeds back to alter our mental models. As our mental models change, we change the structure of our systems, creating different decision rules and new strategies. The same information, interpreted by a different model, now yields a different decision. Systems thinking is an iterative learning process in which we replace a reductionist, narrow, short-run, static view of the world with a holistic, broad, long-term, dynamic view, reinventing our policies and institutions accordingly." (John D Sterman, "Learning in and about complex systems", Systems Thinking Vol. 3, 2003)
"The kernel of a strategy contains three elements: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action." (Richard Rumelt, "Good Strategy/Bad Strategy", 2011)
"Complex systems defy intuitive solutions. Even a third-order, linear differential equation is unsolvable by inspection. Yet, important situations in management, economics, medicine, and social behavior usually lose reality if simplified to less than fifth-order nonlinear dynamic systems. Attempts to deal with nonlinear dynamic systems using ordinary processes of description and debate lead to internal inconsistencies. Underlying assumptions may have been left unclear and contradictory, and mental models are often logically incomplete. Resulting behavior is likely to be contrary to that implied by the assumptions being made about' underlying system structure and governing policies." (Jay W. Forrester, "Modeling for What Purpose?", The Systems Thinker Vol. 24 (2), 2013)
"The work around the complex systems map supported a concentration on causal mechanisms. This enabled poor system responses to be diagnosed as the unanticipated effects of previous policies as well as identification of the drivers of the sector. Understanding the feedback mechanisms in play then allowed experimentation with possible future policies and the creation of a coherent and mutually supporting package of recommendations for change." (David C Lane et al, "Blending systems thinking approaches for organisational analysis: reviewing child protection", 2015)
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