Have you ever engaged the question "what causes science to be so successful?" in solving problems and generating new knowledge?

We believe the last half of the twentieth century provided good "data" that facilitates the study of this question, and to arrive at some  meaningful answers, and we have looked at it in some detail.  Also visit www.sciencemanagement.co.nz for a clearer understanding of how science works (especially if you are interested in understanding how the various branches of science differ and what they have in common).

A short overview of how this study was conducted is given below:

During the mid-twentieth century it became fashionable to utilize scientific method for problem solving in management and organizational settings. This endeavor was called Operations Research (or Operational Research). While there were notable successes, there were also very costly and embarrassing failures, leading Russell Ackoff to write the article The Future of Operations Research is Past.

The question is of course why the methods of science proved to be less successful in these new fields than it has proven itself to be over centuries of application in the natural sciences. Most authors pointed to the complex nature of social systems (like the management and organizational environments), and hence indicated that the reductionist nature of the approaches used in Newtonian science are not suitable. However, the simple observation that nature is also complex, and yet science proved to be successful in nature, caused us to have a closer look at the phenomenon.

In this regard we studied the approaches that developed and claimed to be more successful than science in management and organizational environments, and followed their respective notional developments over the last part of the twentieth century. We looked at approaches like:

1. Scientific Method

2. Systems Thinking

3. Cybernetics

4. Research & Development

We observed that without exception all the approaches we looked at started off by rejecting the reductionist nature of science, and embraced a more holistic approach. This proved to be more appropriate, but also proved to be less productive and yielding results that were of a lesser quality and not always reliable. Over time they therefore needed to adapt their approaches to increase their productivity in problem solving and knowledge generation.

The question is - what did they change? 

If these changes were indeed increasing quality and reliability, they are obvious indicators of what makes an approach more suitable for problem solving and knowledge generation (both of these strong points of science through the centuries).

We found that once again they adapted and embraced new constraints to enhance their productivity and increase the quality of their results. We looked at what they changed and how that impacted on their success and the quality of the results yielded. We noticed that these features that they changed are features already well-known in science. So in following their notional development, we saw how they moved closer and closer to similar constraints than what science has placed on itself. We were able to extract the generic productiveness features of scientific problem solving and knowledge generation as a result.

We also noticed how the rise of pluralism impacted on scientific knowledge generation and problem solving. Once again we were able to compare the various approaches and how they responded to the fact that reality is pluralist and cannot be approached by any one method (like scientific method). From this comparative study we were able to derive the scientific capability features, namely those features that are required to conduct scientific work with the necessary discipline to arrive at high quality, appropriate and useful results.

We offer an e-book where this process of investigation, as well as the nature and use of the scientific productiveness features and scientific capability features are explored and unlocked for practical problem solving and knowledge generation.  This approach is the foundation of our Online, Interactive Course in Scientific Thinking.

The approach that we developed as a result can be used cross-disciplinary and has proven itself to be useful in fields where scientific method has failed in the past.

It turns out that scientific method is one possible configuration of the scientific productiveness features and the scientific capability features, optimized for studying nature. If we study other environments, we can configure these for those environments and use them to engage that environment scientifically.

Keep in mind that the aim of this work has been to increase the quality and success rate of practical problem solving and knowledge generation in organizations.  For this reason the eBook has practical problem solving as focus rather than merely theorizing (although sufficient theoretical foundation is supplied to be able to make the arguments of the findings).

Read more about the Ebook

The  results of this study was published in peer-reviewed journals.  Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see the two publications referenced.  The Ebook provides an integrated record of these two publications.

Science and Research Management

If you are interested in knowing more about how science works, we suggest you also look at the resources made available at www.sciencemanagement.co.nz.  It provides more in-depth information specifically as it relates to the management of science and research.

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