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Scientific Thinking and Decision Making

Scientific Thinking and the development of decision support

This overview of some historical developments may be of interest if you want to understand background as to why Thinking Skills (and in particular scientific thinking in this context) are important in the Knowledge Economy.

1. General Background
2. Cybernetics
3. Systems Thinking
4. Complexity and Chaos Theories
5. Information and Knowledge Sciences
6. Where does Scientific Thinking fit in?
7. What we offer
8. References

General Background

The use of science to support management and strategic decision making started to gain momentum after the 1940s. A good description of some of the decision makers who shaped the American economy in that time and afterwards can be found in the book "Kindred Spirits"¹. New departments started to flourish, using the techniques of science in the fields of business, management and strategic decision making.

While this support to decision makers did indeed add significant value in some areas, it also resulted in some very costly and embarrassing failures. Consequently, a guru in this field, Russell Ackoff, was led to conclude that there is no future in this particular application of science². At the same time other approaches were developed to support organisational decision makers in their difficult task of decision making, notably Cybernetics and Systems Thinking.

Professional Decision Making is more and more dependent on being supported with scientific and other professional services to inform decision makiers. There are several approaches to this service, and we give a very short overview before we explain our approach and the services we provide to those in corporate, management, organisational or any other professional career requiring high risk decision making to solve difficult and complex problems.

Cybernetics

Stafford Beer was the first practitioner to apply the principles of cybernetics (i.e. control systems) to the organisation rather than to directly use the techniques of control systems in organisational studies. He developed his now-famous Viable Systems Model to describe the dynamics of an organisation. In this way He opened a way for the future trend in applying science and engineering to organisational and management studies, namely to use the same principles, not merely to apply the same techniques.

There are two prominent models of cybernetics, namely the mechanical model and the autopoietic model. The latter is used mostly in biological systems, while the first is used for non-biological applications (e.g. machines). Both of these models have been applied in a variety of ways for organisational design and to understand organisational realities, some with more success than others. The main weakness of cybernetics is that the position of the observer of the system (e.g. the organisation) pre-defines how the system is observed. This problem of placing the observer became the Achilles' heel of cybernetics, with the result that its wide acceptance and use have declined in time, so that today it has limited application in organisational and management sciences.

Systems Thinking

It soon became apparent to the practitioners of operational research (or operations research) that the closed boundaries which scientists draw to isolate a problem they are studying to shield it from external influences so its nature and behaviour can be understood, is too restricting for useful management and organisational applications. Open systems, where there are no clear boundaries, need to be studied as open systems, and not forced into being closed systems because the techniques used to analyse such problems required closed boundaries. A more holistic approach was required to produce meaningful results in these "open systems". The various approaches to systems thinking developed from this view. Systems Thinking and System Dynamics are still popular today to understand and support management and organisational decision making. The main problem here is that it tends to be unproductive when applied too rigorously, since there is always more that could have been taken into account, with no clear indication of what not to take into account other than an informed choice (which could potentialy influence its results). So Systems Thinking became a "soft science" that adds value, but is also open to manipulation and can end up being unproductive if not applied with care. Current work in this field is very aware of these problems and trying to overcome or at least capture them in a meaningful way so as to develop systems thinking as an ongoing approach to assist strategic, management and organisational decision makers³.

More recent approaches

Complexity and Chaos theory and the insights created by these new approaches in science captured significant market share in the field of support to strategic, organisational and management decision making. A growing body of knowledge seeks to apply the principles of these disciplines to the problems of organisational, management and strategic decision making. This is currently a very lucrative field, claiming to be able to add much value in the field of management science and a variety of other fields where "traditional, reductionist science fails".

Information and Knowledge sciences are growing, and the parallel development of computer networks and huge databases feed the focus on information sciences, and the quest to "extract knowledge" from these or to utilise them in the "knowledge economy". These sciences claim their stake to the extent that it is generally accepted that just like the industrial revolution changed the face of business (and our lifestyles) significantly, so the information and knowledge sciences are once again bringing about a revolution that is changing both the way we think about organisations, management and strategy, and our lives significantly.

So where does Scientific Thinking fit in?

With more than 18 years of experience in this field and a good knowledge of the various approaches, we have studied this phenomenon since the 1940's to provide a "support service" to management from its inception where "scientific method" was championed to the current very open and multi-faced service that is on offer. This variety does cause confusion to some extent, but also illustrates the variety of approaches required to provide meaningful support. But it also provides us for the first time with sufficient case studies and development paths of these approaches to rethink the concept of "scientific knowledge generation" and extract the features of science that facilitated its unparalleled success in knowledge generation through the centuries.

We have studied the apparent "failure" of science in these fields, the development paths of the approaches that claimed to do better than science in the fields of strategic, management and organisational decision making support, and were able to extract the essential productiveness features for knowledge generation that all of them together through their respective development paths, failures and successes mapped out (and is still mapping out).

These insights are what we offer as our unique "Scientific Thinking" approach for decision makers. Our approach to Scientific Thinking spans all branches of science, and comments on and participates in all the "other approaches" that were developed to support decision makers on this level and this field of decision making⁴.

What we offer

We offer online courses to assist you in developing your own Scientific Thinking skills. Read more about our online courses in Scientific Thinking for decision makers.
We offer en eBook entitled "How do Scientists Think?". This eBook explores the process described above in more detail and provide a resultant scientific approach that is suitable for application where science has not been applied with equal success.
We also offer a service where we can assist you to make sure that all support services offered to your decision making team is of a high quality. Contact us if you want more information about this.

You might also want to read more about our Scientific Thinking Courses, or watch the video we make available online about our scientific thinking course.

References:

Callahan, D., (2002), “Kindred Spirits: Harvard Business School’s Extraordinary class of 1949 and How They Transformed American Business”, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, USA**
Ackoff, R.L., (1979), “The Future of Operational Research is Past”, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 30 (2), 94-104.
Flood, R. L., (2000), “Rethinking the Fifth Discipline, Learning within the Unknowable”, Routledge, London and New York.**
Van der Walt, JM, (2006), “Knowledge Management and Scientific Knowledge Generation”, Knowledge Management Research & Practice, (2006) 4, 319–330.
Van der Walt, M., De Wet, G., "A Framework for Scientific Knowledge Generation", Knowledge Management Research and Practice, (2008) 6, 141 - 154.

** These books are available in our the Vanthinking Online Store (General Category).

eBook: How do Scientists Think?

We offer an eBook entitled "How do Scientists Think?". It explores the generic parameters that scintists emplot when they go about the scientific endeavour.