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Aim and Stats
Now in our fifteenth year of operation, the aim of the "OD" and "BTA" sessions is to continue to foster an appreciation of InThinking
within an emerging network that is developing inside Aerojet Rocketdyne and beyond. Dates for future "OD" and "BTA" sessions along with additional "thinking" opportunities for 2014 can be found in this announcement.
OD + BTA Stats
For an update on OD and BTA statistics, this month's invitation is going out to 1900+ partners in the U.S., as well as fellow InThinking partners in Australia, Austria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Chile, Dubai, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.K. Taken together, these individuals represent over 600 organizations in this list of nations, from elementary schools and senior high schools to colleges and universities, from one-person consulting firms to GenCorp, United Technologies, GM, IBM, General Electric, NASA, Bechtel, Kuwait Energy Company, Philips Electronics, and The Boeing Company.
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Welcome First Timers
Your names have been added to this announcement list by virtue of your attendance in our series of InThinking Roadmap seminars, workshops, and overviews within Aerojet Rocketdyne, or attendance at the annual In2:InThinking Network Forum, through a personal request, from you or a friend. Welcome to our thinking networks.
Click either link below to send me the name(s) and e-mail address(es) of anyone you would like to have added to this mailing list, or let me know if you would like to be removed. Thanks!!!
ADDITIONS
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Meeting Notice Service - OD and BTA
If you'd like to receive meeting notices on your Microsoft Outlook schedule for upcoming Ongoing Discussion conference calls and Better Thinking About... webinars, reply to Bill Bellows at william.bellows@rocket.com and your name will be added to our meeting notice list. |
International Participants
Our conference call sessions are toll-free within the U.S. and Canada. Several international participants have been able to connect toll-free using Skype for a VOIP connection, which we now recommend to others calling in from outside (or inside) the U.S. and Canada.
First, you'll need to establish a Skype account at www.skype.com. Once Skype is set up and functioning correctly the only thing that is different when connecting with our "InThinking Roadmap" conference call sessions ("OD" or "The New Economics Study Sessions") is the use of a pass code and security code. For our "OD" sessions, these numbers are provided once the "participant survey" is completed. For the "The New Economics Study Sessions," these numbers are provided in an email from Tim Higgins, who hosts these calls. In either case, when prompted by Skype to enter these codes, use the keyboard not voice option and be sure to turn off the computer's microphone, otherwise the numeric keys don't function. If the microphone is left on when the codes are entered, Skype's automated operator will reply with "number not recognized," as no number has been transmitted. Also, please note that the "pound key" in the U.S. (#) translates to the "hash key" in the U.K.
New users of Skype are encouraged to perform a conference call test in advance of the scheduled "InThinking Roadmap" conference call. Contact Bill Bellows to arrange for a test call. |
Additional Reading
Beginning in 2009, a series of articles have been prepared for the Lean Management Journal (LMJ) to share InThinking insights with the Lean community. This month's feature LMJ article,
(released with the permission of the LMJ), was prepared to highlight the concepts of interdependence and teamwork.
Contact Bill Bellows with questions, comments, or observations about this article. |
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Good morning from the Los Angeles campus of Aerojet Rocketdyne, located in Canoga Park, California, on the western end of the San Fernando Valley.
Aerojet Rocketdyne's InThinking Network welcomes Ravi Roy, from Northridge, California, to lead our fifth Ongoing Discussion conference call of 2014 on May 19th and 20th and also our 173rd session since we began in January 2000. As for a topic, Ravi has selected "Shared Mental Models," in his first time with us as a Thought Leader.
I was introduced to Ravi in 2012 by Ariane David, a mutual friend, over dinner, where we were joined by Henrik Minassians. Ravi and Henrik are both political scientists at California State University, Northridge, with keen sense of systems and a growing appreciation of W. Edwards Deming and his "System of Profound Knowledge." Little did I know then that our first conversation, about mental models, has become our steady ongoing conversation for two years. Also, little did I know that Ravi has been collaborating on the topic of mental models with both Arthur Denzau, from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, and Nobel Prize economist Douglass North, from Washington University in St. Louis. Together, they authored the article on Shared Mental Models that we are using as our Thought Piece this month. How fitting that in addition to his "OD" appearance this month, Ravi will be appearing as a speaker at the In2:InThinking Network's 2014 Forum, set for June 18-22. Link here for a preview of his session, "Inquiry Beautiful Minds." As for his role as an Ongoing Thought Leader this month, Ravi, along with Art Denzau and Douglass North, begins their Thought Piece (link to the 8.5x11 format) with these ideas,
"For most of the interesting issues in political and economic markets, uncertainty, not risk, characterizes choice-making" (Denzau and North, 1994: 2). When "Shared Mental Models" was being written over ten years ago, our intention was to make changes in the economic model of constrained choice that preserved the valuable contributions of that model, but avoided the obvious flaws. The value of the model in some situations of choice was clear to us, and worth preserving. It seemed nonsensical to believe that people did anything other than maximize their expected utility (recognizing that concerns for others can be included in that utility). However, the model assumed not only maximizing, but that people were substantively rational; i.e. they make the best feasible choice at all times.
This involves not just the simple behavioral assumption that, as Ronald
Coase has said, given the choice, people prefer more money to less. It also heroically assumes that people have correct models of the world in their heads when they make choices. Such models are assumed to accurately predict the set of possible outcomes and a probability distribution over those outcomes. In this approach, the only role of learning is truly Bayesian, that of improving the parameters of the probability distribution estimates relating actions to outcomes. It leaves no room for people to have the wrong model of the world.
The Thought Piece continues with these comments,
If learning has to do with gaining greater understanding about how the
world functions and operates, then our ability to do so to rests upon our
ability to distill and organize facts. But what facts we focus on and which we ignore are largely determined by the mental models or beliefs we hold about a subject. In such settings, it has been argued that we think not as sequential logic engines, but rather by pattern recognition and neural nets (see Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 1991) or by the use of metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
In both of those approaches, learning is often contextual. We learn in
relationship to what else we know, what we believe, our prejudices and our fears. We assimilate new knowledge by building upon our existing structure of beliefs. And in contexts where existing knowledge of a subject matter is scarce or incomplete, uncertainty looms. In such contexts mental models become critical in shaping how individuals process, construe, and regard new and unfamiliar facts and evidence. Under conditions where there is no preexisting knowledge of a subject matter or where new or unfamiliar facts present themselves in the face of existing knowledge, mental models becomes pivotal in shaping our understanding of what is rational and what is not. It is in such situations when our existing models fail that Bayesian learning gets us nowhere, and new approaches are required.
Link here to register to attend.
Biography
Ravi Roy holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles (College of Honors); an M.A. in public policy from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California; and a Ph.D. in political science (with a concentration in comparative political economy/public policy), also from Claremont Graduate University. He was also a post-doctoral fellow at the Claremont Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
Ravi is also a research fellow at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to his CSUN appointment, he was director of the Master's Program in International Development in the School of Global Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
In addition, Ravi has written or co-written three books and was the lead editor on a fourth, which focused on the role of ideas and mental models in shaping people's discrete understandings of the choices available to them and how these, in turn, inform their various policy preferences.
Contact Ravi by e-mail at ravi.roy@csun.edu with any questions or comments you would like to share with him in preparation for this OD session.
Looking ahead, our Better Thinking About... webinars continue next month, with a focus on Systems Thinking, hosted by Emma Langman on Thursday, June 12th, from 11:30-1pm.
Link here to register to attend this webinar in advance of the announcement.
Associate Fellow and Lead
InThinking Network
Aerojet Rocketdyne
Canoga Park, California
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May 19th - 20th OD Details
Please join us for one or all of this month's series of OD conference calls. As always, you are invited to participate for as long, or as short, as you can in one or more of these sessions, Options 1-4. Note that these conference calls are "conversations, not presentations," which vary from session to session, due to a variety of causes, such as who participates, what questions are asked, and what learning transpires. This diversity is captured every month, as the calls are recorded, with links to these audio files shared with all who register to attend.
Option - Date/Time (Pacific Time);
1 - Monday, May 19th, 12:00-1:00pm
2 - Monday, May 19th, 1:00-2:00pm
3 - Tuesday, May 20th - 12:00-1:00pm
4 - Tuesday, May 20th - 1:00-2:00pm
The agenda for each option will be:
Opening 15 minutes: Call in and Introductions
Next 40 minutes: Ongoing Discussion
Last 5 minutes: Farewells and Close
Please reply to this note by noon, Pacific Time on Friday, May 16th to confirm your plans to participate in one (or more) of these options. If you do plan to attend, please complete the OD PARTICIPATION SURVEY by using the link below...
PARTICIPANT SURVEY
Telecon lines (including a pass code and a security code) have been arranged for those who cannot join us in a conference room at our Canoga Park facility and are provided upon completion of the participant survey.
As always, please forward this announcement to anyone we missed who would also like to participate.
Regards...
Bill |
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Future Ongoing Discussion Conference Calls
Mark your calendars - future Ongoing Discussion conference calls will be held on the following dates (subject to slight changes), from 12-1pm and 1-2pm Pacific Time.
Month, Dates, Thought Leader(s), Topics (link on each session to register):
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Future Better Thinking About... Webinars
Mark your calendars - future Better Thinking About... webinars will be held on the following dates, from 11:30-1pm Pacific Time. Details for how to participate in this webinar series are provided upon registering using the participant survey for each event.
Date, Presenter, and Topic (link on each session to register):
September 11, Gipsie Ranney, Causes
October 9, Don McAlister, the Interdependency of Project, Risk, and Knowledge Management
November 13, Tim Higgins, Thinking Tools and Processes
December 11, Bill Bellows, InThinking |
InThinking Together Seminar
Description: This seminar explores the philosophies of a variety of management theorist, including but not limited to Russell Ackoff, W. Edwards Deming, Edward de Bono, Tom Johnson, and Genichi Taguchi, among many others; as they apply to the management of organizational resources, including ideas, innovation, knowledge, money, equipment, and space. Among the topics of discussion will be the concepts of "better thinking about thinking" (InThinking) and Purposeful Resource Management as well as Purposeful Resource Leadership. The seminar will introduce you to these ideas through a series of questions that are specially selected to create awareness of a new approach to working together, learning together, and thinking together.
Registration Fee: there is NO fee to attend
Prerequisites: there are NO prerequisites
Format: two 4.5-hour sessions over two days, offered as an in-person event
Presented by: Bill Bellows
Schedule for InThinking Together classes in Canoga Park, CA for Aerojet Rocketdyne
Class #CP-2014-05
Part 1 - 19-May - 7:00-11:30am
Part 2 - 20-May - 7:00-11:30am
Class #CP-2014-06 (to be held at California State University, Northridge)
Part 1 - 18-Jun - 9:00-12:00pm
Part 2 - 18-Jun - 1:00-4:15pm
Class #CP-2014-07 (to be hosted by College of the Canyons in Valencia)
Part 1 - 24-Jul - 7:00-11:30am
Part 2 - 25-Jul - 7:00-11:30am
Register to attend InThinking Together |
The New Economics Study Session
Description: A group of participants assembles, some in-person and some via teleconference, for this 14-hour series. Participants discuss W. Edwards Deming's last book, The New Economics, in which he introduced his concept of a "System of Profound Knowledge." The group reads specified chapters before each session and discusses the meaning and application of the ideas, as well as personal reactions to the ideas. Supplemental reading material become part of the conversations, as do reactions to video tapes of Dr. Deming.
Registration Fee - there is NO fee to attend. In addition, this is a toll-free call from the United States and Canada. International participants are welcome to join in as well, provided they do so at their own expense for the conference call. Aerojet Rocketdyne attendees will be given copies of The New Economics. Non-Aerojet Rocketdyne attendees can purchase copies on Amazon at this link, with used copies selling for $15 and Kindle copies available for $15.95.
Prerequisite - there are NO prerequisites
Format - seven 2-hour sessions over three and a half weeks, presented as a teleconference event
Presented by: Tim Higgins
Schedule for The New Economics Study Session
Class #CP-2014-02
Starting on 12-May, seven sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays, from 3:00-5:00pm (skipping 26-May and ending on 4-Jun)
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