March 2009 Ongoing Discussion Announcement, with John Pourdehnad

John Pourdehnad is the Associate Director for the Ackoff Collaboratory for Advancement of Systems Approaches and Adjunct Professor, Systems Engineering, in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a long time associate of and collaborator with Russell Ackoff, who was our Thought Leader in January.

The title of John's Thought Piece is "New Frontiers in a Knowledge-Based Economy: The Influence of Innovation, Design Thinking, and Social Computing". He believes that the knowledge-based economy has "changed everything," and that the next wave of economic growth is going to come from knowledge-based businesses. The economy is shifting from an era of competitive advantage based on data and information, fixed assets and financial capital, to one based on knowledge and new idea creation. Thus, organizations must find the means to dramatically accelerate learning and enhance their own processes of intellectual capital formation - i.e., via innovation.

New strategies will have to be employed - processes will have to be developed that tap into the tacit knowledge of stakeholders, especially, employees and customers. Firms will find it helpful to emphasize the process of design thinking - a method of creative and critical thought that allows information and ideas to be organized, decisions to be made, situations to be improved, and knowledge to be gained.

Unfortunately, some executives seem to be in the dark about the value of managing intellectual capital. Learning to nurture and manage the flow of knowledge may be the most distinctive challenge - and competence - of our times.

In preparation for this conversation with John, you might wish to consider some of the following questions, or devise some of your own to bring to the conversation. If you wish, you can send your questions to him in advance (link below);

1. In what ways have you experienced change as a result of the influence of a knowledge-based economy? Are all companies or organizations affected in the same way?

2. What are the signs of a shift? How do we recognize such a thing?

3. Will only new thinking do, or is there some thinking that we can bring with us to this new environment?

4. How do you manage your own (personal) intellectual capital?

5. What is the role of collaboration in this new economy?

6. What do we mean when we talk about the flow of knowledge? Where is it flowing from, and where is it flowing to? What about knowledge rocks?

Biography: John is engaged in the field of organizational management, using systems thinking as a world view and communicating its implications for management. As a scholar-practitioner he has been involved with numerous projects helping management teams with the resolution of complex problems. He has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level, worked as an educator/consultant with for-profit and not-for-profit organizations and government agencies, and has also been a co-principal investigator in a number of research programs.

John's primary areas of interest include implications of systems thinking in complex problem formulation (including complex project management) and systems redesign. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal, Systems Research and Behavioral Science; a member of the Academy of Management ; and an honorary member of the Society for Organizational Excellent in Bulgaria. His applied scholarship also includes knowledge development in the creation of new products and services, and the development of socio-technical systems for learning and knowledge-to-wisdom management in complex adaptive systems. He has also been integrating a series of thematic concepts such as idealized design, business model design, open innovation and Enterprise 2.0 into an integrated workable whole.

A leader in "design thinking," John is a Fellow of the Da Vinci Institute for Technology and Management in Rivonia Gauteng, South Africa. In 2008, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to visit the New Bulgarian University in Sophia, Bulgaria to help create the "Design Institute" for the practice of design thinking using trans-disciplinary teams to cope with complex and intractable problems. In Bulgaria and globally, he has presented lectures, mostly on systems thinking, in various educational, corporate and government institutions.

John received his Ph.D. in Systems Sciences from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Link here to see him in a recent interview with BusinessWeek magazine on the topic of "Cutting Through the Red Tape."

Contact John by email (jp2consult@aol.com) with any questions you would like to share with him in preparation for his OD session with us.